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ARMA Survey on Records Management Woes

Need more proof that the majority of enterprises aren't prepared to handle email archiving and eDiscovery? ARMA International conducted a survey of its members on behalf of CA, Inc., and found many are still using manual processes for records management.

ARMA International is a non-profit organization that provides education and up to date information on standards, best practices and legislation for Records and Information Management.

The survey was sent in September to ARMA's entire membership base -- over 9,000 strong -- with approximately 1,062 individuals responding. Of the respondents over 75% held Records Management jobs, 4% legal/compliance and the rest IT.

Survey Key Findings

The results of the survey should not be surprising to most:

• 72% felt unprepared for email management
• 68% were unprepared for eDiscovery
• 75% did not have an enterprise system to manage content -- digital or physical records
• 62% did not have an email archiving system
• 66% use the same retention policies for physical and electronic documents, but many were not consistent in their application nor enforcement of these policies
• 41% manage their email according to their retention policy

Strangely enough, even though these enterprises lacked strong management of email and other information, they saw the management of different types of application critical.

Applications Needing Retention Policies

Respondents listed the following applications/systems, in order of importance, as needing retention management:

1. Email and email archives
2. Both physical and electronic storage
3. Accounting systems
4. Document management systems (DMS)
5. Voicemail
6. Mobile devices
7. Enterprise content management systems (ECM)
8. Instant message
9. Collaborative systems
10. Contact management systems, as well as other content silos

eDiscovery Findings

Results showed that Email, Document Management Systems, Accounting Systems, Physical and Electronic storage were the most important for eDiscovery.

65% of discovery processes are handled manually and 11% were outsourced. The rest were handled through the use of software applications.

Over half the respondents differentiated between eDiscovery and Discovery processes. In addition, over 54% didn't know what types of repositories their company had for automating discovery. Those that did, listed email archiving and document management systems as having an automated process.

One interesting finding is that most respondents didn't know how much their company spent on discovery or individual cases. They did, however, believe their risk was moderate.

There's a lot of good information packed in this survey all to tell us that we have a long way to go when it comes to Records Management. Sign up for the full report on the ARMA website.

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