AIIM's Email Management Industry Watch

Results Indicate Startling Findings

Earlier this year, AIIM’s Annual Email Management Industry Watch was released with some extremely interesting findings.

AIIM is the industry leader in helping users to understand the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes. The survey was taken by nearly 1,200 members of the AIIM community.

A summary of the research shows:

• On average, respondents spend more than an hour and a half per day processing their emails, with one in five spending three or more hours of their day.
• Over half have hand-held access by phones, Blackberries and PDAs. Two thirds process work-related emails out of office hours with 28% confessing to doing so “after work, on weekends and during vacations”.
• “Sheer overload” is reported as the biggest problem with email as a business tool, followed closely by “Finding and recovering past emails” and “Keeping track of actions”.
• Email archiving, legal discovery, findability and storage volumes are the biggest current concerns within organizations, with security and spam now considered less of a concern by our respondents.
• Over half of respondents are “not confident” or only “slightly confident” that emails related to documenting commitments and obligations made by staff are recorded, complete, and retrievable.
• Only 10% of organizations have completed an enterprise-wide email management initiative, with 20% currently rolling out a project. Even in larger organizations, 17% have no plans to, although the remaining 29% are planning to start sometime in the next 2 years.
• Some 45% of organizations (including the largest ones) do not have a policy on Outlook “Archive settings” so most users will likely create .pst archive files on local drives.
• Only 19% of those surveyed capture important emails to a dedicated email management system or to a general purpose ECM system. 18% print emails and file as paper, and a worrying 45% file in nonshared personal Outlook folders.
• A third of organizations have no policy to deal with legal discovery, 40% would likely have to search back-up tapes, and 23% feel they would have gaps from deleted emails. Only 16% have retention policies that would justify deleted emails.
• Overall, respondents plan to spend more on Email Management software in 2009 than 2008.