Management Of Electronic Records Still Not Taken Seriously: Research

PRESS RELEASE

Silver Spring, MD " September 29, 2009 " Electronic records are twice as likely to be unmanaged compared to paper records, according to industry researcher AIIM, with 26% of organizations admitting that no records management disciplines are applied to the majority of their electronic records. In a new survey entitled "Electronic Records Management still playing catchup with paper," AIIM found that policies for applying legal hold to electronic records exist in only 56% of organizations compared to 71% for paper records. With IT staff rather than records management staff expected to carry out records management processes on electronic documents and emails, organizations could be heading into trouble.

Based on over 700 responses, the AIIM survey shows that the volume of paper records is still increasing in over half of organizations, but in 21% it is finally showing signs of going down. Meanwhile, 70% of respondents report that the volume of electronic records is increasing rapidly, with none reporting a decrease. Over half of the respondents now scan newly received paper items and file them electronically. On the other hand, as well as directly filing incoming paper documents, 40% admit that they print newly generated electronic documents and emails for the purpose of filing them as paper records.

John Mancini, President of AIIM, comments, "I'm concerned that management of electronic records is still not being taken as seriously as that of paper records. We found that over a third of organizations, if challenged, would not be confident that their electronic records had not been changed, deleted or inappropriately accessed. For organizations over 5,000 employees it rises to 43%. These companies would be at a major disadvantage in any legal action " defending or prosecuting."

The survey found that 13% of organizations are already using dedicated ediscovery tools with a further 22% planning to do so. Forty percent use functions within their ECM (Enterprise Content Management) or ERM (Electronic Records Management) systems for ediscovery, and 11% have invested in Enterprise Search to help with this.

The AIIM research report entitled "Electronic Records Management still playing catchup with paper," part of the AIIM Industry Watch series, is available for free download from the AIIM website. The survey and report was underwritten by Autonomy, EMC Corporation, FCS, HP, Mimosa Systems and StoredIQ.

About the research The AIIM survey was taken by 768 individual members of the AIIM community between July 30th and August 18th, 2009, using a Webbased tool. Invitations to take the survey were sent via email to a selection of the 65,000 community members.

About AIIM AIIM (www.aiim.org) is the community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize their information. For over 60 years, AIIM has been the leading nonprofit organization focused on helping users to understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes. About Autonomy Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software for the enterprise, spearheads the Meaning Based Computing movement. Recently ranked by IDC as the clear leader in enterprise search revenues, Autonomy's technology allows computers to form a conceptual and contextual understanding of any piece of electronic data, including unstructured information, such as text, email, web pages, voice, or video.

About EMC EMC Corporation is the world's leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. The EMC Documentum family of enterprise content management solutions provides a comprehensive, fullyunified software platform to manage and leverage content in a costeffective, controlled manner.

About FCS FCS IG is a specialized professional services practice offering Information Governance consulting services. We help our clients maximize the value of information and comply with legal requirements for its management. FCS IG accomplishes this by providing a range of records management, compliance, assessment, implementation, training and other services. FCS IG is a practice of Forensics Consulting Solutions, LLC.

About Mimosa Systems Mimosa Systems delivers nextgeneration content archiving solutions with its NearPoint solution platform. Mimosa NearPoint is the industry's most comprehensive solution unifying email archiving, file archiving, and SharePoint archiving with recovery and storage consolidation. It is the first and only product to combine archiving and recovery in one unified solution.

About Stored IQ StoredIQ's awardwinning Intelligent Information Management solution enables organizations to gain visibility and control over businesscritical information to meet compliance, governance and eDiscovery requirements. With StoredIQ, companies can quickly and easily deploy a unified solution to manage information enterprisewide according to business value, while reducing risk and cost in the process.