Recommind announced the results of surveying 200 CIOs and IT directors in large UK organizations about key pain points with information management:
“The research, conducted in conjunction with the InfoRiskAwareness Project, highlighted that more than one third (36 percent) of all UK CIOs and IT directors cited email overload as their company’s main pain point, whereas only 8 percent of those surveyed considered social media tools, such as Twitter and LinkedIn, to be the utmost concern – a considerable drop from 35 percent in 2010’s results.
Whereas IT budgetary allocations for social media were in close alignment with just 11 percent of respondents focusing on managing Web 2.0 information, the research indicates that just 16 percent of organisations assigned the majority of their budget to addressing email management, despite being the UK’s top pain point. This inability to gain control over enterprise email at a time when information risk is escalating, will have costly repercussions to businesses in the long term.
The challenge of information management has heightened recently as organisations realise the risk and repercussions surrounding the electronic information that is within their firewall. Seemingly benign stores of archived email are not so benign when faced with the UK’s increasingly stringent regulatory climate, including an increase in high-profile investigations, the rise in financial penalties such as ICO fines and the announcement of the controversial UK Bribery Act. Whereas email archives were once forgotten data stores, the risk of maintaining them has caused 71 percent of companies surveyed to rethink their information risk strategy in order to protect themselves from financial and reputational damage.“
My Comments
1. Given how much business communication is transported via email, it’s critical to get the management side of it right. From the above research, it sounds like few organizations have a robust strategy today.
2. The same issues apply to collaboration systems, although they are less well-understood. For more, see my archiving and ediscovery for collaboration systems article at Messaging News, from November 2009.
Categories: Culture & Competency
Michael Sampson 
Email is critical for organization. Company my father works in has over 80% of communication handled through Lotus Notes mailing system (although they are going to switch to Outlook).
Security of those kind of information is essential, so entire communication is handled through VPN. This makes it a hassle, but not a single bit of information should drop out of that information funnel.
Handling email is becoming more and more a trouble. One thing that helps me handle information overload is gmail and cleaver use of filters.
Therefore I feel sorry for all that corporate crowd, that is stuck with old school mailing systems, that are slow, robust and unintelligent.