Editor’s note: The following is taken from AIIM’s latest “Industry Watch” research study. We urge you to visit the AIIM website and download the entire, 17-page report, containing 21 graphs and charts, at www.aiim.org/research.

As the non-profit association dedicated to nurturing, growing and supporting the ECM (Enterprise Content Management) community, AIIM is proud to provide this research at no charge. In this way the education, thought leadership and direction provided by our work can be leveraged by the entire community.

We would like this research to be as widely distributed as possible. Feel free to use this research in presentations and publications with the attribution: “© AIIM 2009, www.aiim.org”. Rather than redistribute a copy of this report to your colleagues, we would prefer that you direct them to www.aiim.org/research for a free download of their own. The results of the survey and the market commentary made in this report are independent of any bias from the vendor community.

Process used and survey demographics: This survey was taken by 1,109 members of the AIIM community between March 23rd and April 3, 2009, using a Web-based tool. Invitations to participate were sent via email to the AIIM community of 65,000. Most statistics regarding organizations are for those with more than 10 employees.

Like it or not, email is the nerve system of modern business. Compared to the phone, it is asynchronous and provides a written record to the sender and recipient for follow-up action or later reference. In this respect, it is much more useful than instant messaging or social networks.

It can be frivolous or deadly serious – it’s possible to be fired via an email, but also due to an email. Many vital decisions are made by email exchange, and the implication of our usage findings is that these may be made on the move, on tiny screens, and when otherwise off-duty.

Whether within their own office or between organizations separated by thousands of miles and many time zones, the sender will assume that all sent emails are received, and that they are read.

They will frequently expect a response within hours, let alone days. All this despite the ease of misaddressing, the hit-or-miss nature of mobile synchronization, the spam filters, the reply-to-all clutter, and the mass deletions required to stand any chance of keeping one’s inbox usable.

A mere four years ago, one of the questions in the AIIM email survey was “Which of your business interactions are likely to be carried out via email?” Today, email is pervasive across all aspects of all businesses – and is highly business-critical.

For many information workers, the email client is their primary business application. They spend many hours of the office day reading, responding and collaborating via emails. Indeed, this survey shows that most also spend considerable amounts of out-of-office time checking emails and “staying in touch” with work.

Strange, then, that the email history created by these responses and interactions is so poorly maintained, and the ability of knowledge workers to search for important content within current and past emails – their own and those of their colleagues – is so poor.

In a large organization, several millions of emails are handled each day. Most are of no lasting consequence, but each day there will be a significant number of important emails involving the organization in obligations, agreements, contracts, regulations and discussions, all of which might be of legal significance.

In this report we discuss how these important records are being dealt with, what policies are in place, how aware staff are of the issues, and which technologies are in use.

For the discussions within this report, an email management system may be a specialized stand-alone system or an integration of an ECM or records management system with the email client.

Key Findings

• On average, our 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 outside office hours with 28 percent 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 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 percent of organizations have completed an enterprise-wide email management initiative, with 20 percent currently rolling out a project. Even in larger organizations, 17 percent have no plans to, although the remaining 29 percent are planning to start sometime in the next 2 years.
• Some 45 percent 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 percent of those surveyed capture important emails to a dedicated email management system or to a general purpose ECM system. 18 percent print emails and file as paper, and a worrying 45 percent file in nonshared personal Outlook folders.
• A third of organizations have no policy to deal with legal discovery, 40 percent would likely have to search back-up tapes, and 23 percent feel they would have gaps from deleted emails. Only 16 percent have retention policies that would justify deleted emails.
• Overall, respondents plan to spend more • on Email Management software in 2009 than 2008.

Conclusion
Taking the report’s subtitle as a lead, the good news is that email management issues are now better understood, and a third of organizations plan fresh investment in this area over the next two years. The bad news is that even within their current technology limits over 50 percent of organizations have set no policies for dealing with important emails as shareable and retrievable records, nor do they have policies for legal discovery processes. There are many ugly findings. Probably the worst is that most organizations are not protecting users from the misleadingly named “archive” setting within the Outlook mail client, which as a default moves older emails from the server onto the local hard drive. Another ugly one is that 40 percent of organizations might need to search back-up tapes in the event of a legal discovery requirement, and that 84 percent would have no way to justify why emails of a certain age or type had been deleted.

Doug Miles is head of AIIM’s Market Intelligence Division. He has over 25 years’ 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.