AIIM, the community that provides education, research and best practices to help organizations find, control and optimize their information, recently released new market research titled E-Discovery and ERM: how is records management performing in the new spotlight? (available at this link).

Some of the key findings that I thought were significant:

• 83% of the respondents feel that the importance of records management has increased in the last 2-3 years, considerably so for 40% of them.   However, if you review where records management responsibility lies in the organization, less than 20% have it as a direct responsibility at the Executive level.  41% of the respondents indicate the manager responsible for records and information management reports directly to a member of the Executive team.  Records Management seems to be having more direct representation in the C-level suite.
• Over the last 2 years, budgets for records and information management have increased in 43% of the organizations and decreased in only 13%.  These budgets are expected to increase further in the next 2 years according to those who responded to the survey.  Unfortunately, the budget increase does not fully reflect the increase in importance of records management measured in the bullet point above.
• 35% are not using nor planning to use SharePoint for document or records management.  33% of those already using SharePoint for document management are not planning to use it for Records Management.
• In 26% of the organizations, records eligible for destruction (i.e. undeleted records beyond their retention period) have affected a court case, twice as often weakening it rather than strengthening it.
• 36% do not have any legal hold procedures and a further 9% have a hold policy for paper records but not for electronic records.
• When asked what the top two business drivers were for their organization's decision to plan a Records Management System, 62% said it was part of their planning for Information Management in general and 47% said it was for risk assessment against their compliance procedures.  There was a slight disagreement of the latter top answer because in another question in the survey on priorities and spending plans, 74% agreed that improved knowledge access and content sharing is a stronger benefit of ERM than compliance or e-discovery.  It seems like between these 2 questions, better information management is more of a driver than compliance.  It seems like in the past, many organizations have used the stick over the carrot in trying to convince companies to invest in records management.  Maybe we are starting to see a shift in attitudes.
• When asked "How would you best describe your organization's past history with electronic records management projects," 25% said that had been using their systems successfully for less than 2 years and 41% indicated they had been successfully using their system for over 3 years.  It was interesting that 34% said they had a system but it was not successful for either technical, usability or "political" reasons.
• The responses on how would you best describe your organization's overall philosophy regarding email varied widely.  The opposite ends of the spectrum had 23% keeping everything "just in case" and 26% had deletion policies tied to server space, employees leaving or a time requirement.  37% manually declared important emails as records and 7% used autoclassification of emails.  18% have no policy regarding email and 13% have central policies, but they are not enforced on laptops or mobile devices.

The report has a lot of detail on the above and several sections on E-discovery experiences and systems being used by the respondents.  It is definitely worth a detailed review.