Electronic Records Management -- Still Playing Catch-Up with Paper?

Editor’s note: The following is excerpted from AIIM’s latest “Industry Watch” research study. We urge you to visit the AIIM website (see more in sidebar) and download—at no cost—the entire, 27-page report, containing more than 30 graphs and charts.

Electronics records management (ERM) was originally developed as a stand-alone application, frequently managing physical items as well as electronic documents. It has subsequently become one of the key elements of any integrated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) implementation. It is the robust cornerstone underlying compliance and legal discovery, which increasingly calls for electronic documents to be treated in the same way as paper documents.

For this report, we have compared policies and effectiveness between the management of electronic records and that of traditional paper. Legal discovery and litigation hold have created a demand for specific ediscovery tools, so we looked at their adoption in this study. We also looked at the integration issues across multiple records repositories and measured longterm archival strategies.

Overall, our findings show that in most organizations, electronic records are still taken less seriously than paper records. Responsibility for applying good records management practices to electronic records would seem to reside in the IT department rather than in the records department, and even where good policies exist, they are often not monitored or enforced.

Having said that, an encouraging number of organizations are homogenizing their electronic and physical policies and practices, and many are moving to an all-electronic model, linking their repositories together in order to improve the legal discovery process and enhance operational efficiency.

Key Findings:

• The volume of paper records is still increasing steadily in 56 percent of organizations, but in 22 percent it is at last showing signs of decreasing. Meanwhile the volume of electronic records is “increasing rapidly” for 70 percent, and unsurprisingly, is not decreasing for any.
• Half of responding organizations are scanning newly received paper items and filing them electronically rather than manually, and a third of businesses are looking to go to all-electronic records-keeping.
• But for the other half, as well as manually filing inbound paper documents, 40 percent admit to routinely printing newly-generated office documents and emails for the purpose of filing them as paper records.
• Electronic records are more than twice as likely to be described as “unmanaged” than paper records.
• 71 percent of organizations have a procedure for legal hold of paper records in the event of litigation, but only 57 percent have one for electronic records.
• For 25 percent of organizations, legal discovery of paper records would take at least a month, whereas for electronic records this is 17 percent.
• There is a reliance on IT staff to carry out legal discovery on electronic records in the majority of companies, whereas records-management staff or line-ofbusiness staff deal with paper records. 
• 13 percent of organizations are using dedicated ediscovery tools and a further 22 percent are planning to do so. 42 percent are utilizing their ECM/ERM suites for ediscovery and 12 percent are using enterprise search.
• Of those organizations with no ECM/ ERM system, 60 percent would not be confident, if challenged, that their electronic records have not been changed, deleted, or inappropriately accessed.
• 38 percent of those polled admit that there is little or no enforcement of their records-management policies and 55 percent set no guidance on dealing with important emails as records.
• 31 percent of organizations have 20 or more content repositories that could usefully be linked, with email as the highest priority content. 
• 35 percent are using in-house developed links to join up repositories and a further 28 percent are using vendor custom-developed links. CMIS (content management interoperability services specification) has gained traction in only 15 percent of organizations as yet. 
• Half of organizations would “possibly” store records in a local, identifiable outsource, but 77 percent state they would never use a public cloud (e.g., Google, Amazon, or Microsoft) even if they were assured of an onshore storage location. However, 67 percent would consider a corporate or government cloud.
• Two thirds of organizations store a significant proportion of their records in native formats such as Word and Excel, although a third plan to convert to PDF/A over the next three years. • Over 70 percent of organizations have made no plans or provision for longterm archiving of electronic records, with no policies for migrating to new media, translating formats, or virtualization of applications.
• Spending on records-management systems and modules is expected to be up overall in the next 12 months. Consultancy services show a slight net fall.

Doug Miles is head of AIIM’s Market Intelligence Division. He has over 25 years of experience working with users and vendors across a broad spectrum of IT applications and was an early pioneer of document management systems for business and engineering applications. He holds an MSc in Communications Engineering.