Email, Discovery and SharePoint: 3 Key Document Management Issues

By David Roe (@druadh20) Jul 21, 2009

Earlier this year AIIM (news, site) released its annual State of the ECM Industry 2009 report which found that overall, electronic content at an organizational level is in a mess.

Revisiting the report in the cold light of day AIIM President John Mancini summed up the findings of the report on the Digital Landfill blog recently.

Hardly a day goes by that we don't find ourselves covering some of the eight facts about document management that he raises. Three of these in particular, strike a chord with us, as we are sure they do with you.

Email Exposure
Legal Discovery
SharePoint Deployments

Email Exposure

Most companies still regard email with suspicion despite the considerable amount of ‘secure’ products on the market. Over half (55%) still have no confidence that emails are recorded, complete and recoverable. And attachments seem to bear the brunt of that.

Need more information? Read these articles:

Survey Finds Email Management a Major Legal Discovery Risk, shows that the principal concern companies have in relation to email management is archiving. This particular survey from AIIM found that most companies don’t have an archiving solution in place.
Confidence in Email Archiving Waning shows that confidence in email is falling every year with 63% of UK respondents demonstrating little confidence that emails related to commitments and obligations made by themselves and their staff are recorded, complete and recoverable.
ARMA Survey on Records Management Woes in which ARMA International conducted a survey of its members on behalf of CA, Inc., and found many are still using manual processes for records management.

Legal Discovery

With legal discovery the findings are just as pessimistic. The production of documents for legal discovery will take more than four weeks for 28% of organizations, with a one in three chance of companies being exposed to legal challenges.

Companies that declare within four weeks do so because they have to rather than because they are ready to.

Other CMSWire coverage on the subject:

Learning from Others' Mistakes: A Case for eDiscovery, which provides a good case study of how it can happen and how much companies stand to loose if they do not have adequate ediscovery solutions installed.
The Cost of Information Misgovernance, and What You Can Do about IT. Betsy Atkins most recently served as the CEO and Chairman of Clear Standards and is also a recognized “expert witness” on Corporate Governance Best Practices testifying in the Adelphia bankruptcy case.
Top eDiscovery Trends 2009 If you are unclear as to where eDiscovery is going at the moment the folks at Clearwell Systems, whose platform works to streamline the eDiscovery process, offered a few predictions for the 2009. Among them, trends that respond to financial and legal stresses as well as a need for more collaboration.

SharePoint Deployments

Finally, no analysis of the document management industry could be complete without reference to SharePoint. The State of the Industry 2009 report showed that there is no consensus on how to deploy SharePoint with 29% of organizations deploying it in parallel to, or even in competition with existing enterprise content management, document management or records management suites.