Email has become the predominant means of business communication. Why then are so few organizations managing it effectively?
The following are the key findings from a survey AIIM recently conducted:
- On average, respondents spend more than 1.5 hours per day processing email, with 20% spending 3+ hours per day.
- Over 50% have hand-held access with Smartphone’s and tablets. 67% process work-related emails out of office hours with 28% confessing to doing so “after work, on weekends and during vacations.” (This was in 2009, so we’re confident the percentages have increased.)
- “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.” This calls for a good tagging, tracking and archive solution.
- Email archiving, legal discovery, findability and storage volumes are the biggest concerns within organizations, with security and spam now considered less of a concern by respondents.
- Over 50% 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 two years.
- 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 non-shared 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.
What are you doing to integrate, track and archive email and attachments in your firm?