AIIM (the Content Management Association), released a new Electronic Records Management Industry Watch survey last week.  You can download the full report here (registration required).

The survey was taken by 768 individual members of the AIIM community between July 30th and August 18th, 2009.

A key finding for me is how many organizations still seem to manage records by their format rather than by the fact that it is evidence of a business transaction or a record.  In many cases, organizations have different people or groups responsible or use different processes or procedures based of the format of the record.

For instance, in the area of legal discovery, IT staff is being called on to carry out those processes for electronic records where Records Managers carry them out for paper records.  In another area of the survey results, 71% of the organizations have a procedure for legal hold of paper records in the event of litigation, but only 57% have one for electronic records.

Only 45% of the organizations claimed to have one set of policies that are applied to both physical and electronic records.  But less than 30% of the respondents said the policies they do have are monitored and either strongly or somewhat enforced.

Another interesting statistic from the survey is that despite so many documents being "born digital", the volume of paper records is still increasing steadily in many organizations.  It is not surprising that most respondents say that electronic records growth was "increasing rapidly."

Digital preservation is a topic that I've been interested in for the last several years.  Digital preservation is defined as the long-term, error-free storage of digital information, with the means for retrieval and interpretation, for all the time span that the information is required for.  Over 60% of the respondents are required to keep some of their records into the foreseeable future (at least six years), yet almost 70% of the respondents have no policy or budgets for migration to updated media, translation to new formats or for coping with obsolete applications.  Clearly this is a gap in many organizations and has been for many years as past surveys from AIIM and ARMA have had similar findings.

It is also interesting to relate the survey results to the demographics that were published in the appendix.  Just over one-half of the respondents identified themselves as being from Records Management, while 19% were from IT.

There are many more details available in the full report.  Review them and let us know what you think.