Although electronic record-keeping has become a must, many organisations are still taking a haphazard approach, according to a global survey on information governance conducted by AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management). Senior management seems to be ignoring the risks; in fact, 31 percent of responding organisations report that poor electronic recordkeeping is causing problems with regulators, auditors and courts.

AIIM is particularly concerned that despite good intentions, the delete button is not being pressed for electronic records once they reach their allocated retention dates. This not only increases discovery risks but also does nothing to reduce storage volumes into the future. Results of the survey suggest that for a third of organisations, 90 percent of their IT spend adds no new value to the business. For more than a quarter of respondents, the response to their information deluge is to "buy more disks."

Despite many high profile court cases, the filing systems for email are still chaotic in many organisations. In the News International phone-hacking case in London last year, multiple criminal prosecutions resulted from email evidence that was ordered to be deleted many times, with policy being made up on the fly. 

Nearly a third of respondents in the AIIM survey admit the probability of multiple copies of emails on desktops, laptops and mobile devices, and 12 percent still do not have an email archiving policy. 

Even where companies do have email records policies, they generally rely on manual methods for selection and tagging. However, the use of auto-classification techniques is growing and this is likely to improve search and discovery. It will also help set appropriate retention schedules, which in turn will reduce content storage volumes in the future.

John Mancini, president of AIIM, said, "Many organisations lack enterprise-wide information governance policies and even those that have them often don't train their staff and don't enforce the policy. 

"This is causing a double whammy. Their only hope of keeping a lid on storage volumes is to set and implement rigid retention periods for their content. Not doing so also exposes them to increased risk in the courts. The longer they put off getting started on this, the longer it's going to be before six- and eight-year retention periods begin to kick in. Executives need to wake up to this ticking time bomb."

Other key findings in the AIIM report include:

--  Progress toward the "paperless office" is slow. For 42 percent of organizations, the volume of paper records is still increasing;

--  The content may be electronic but the eDiscovery mechanisms are still manual. More than half of companies still rely on manual searches for eDiscovery across file shares, email and physical records;

 --  Cloud service providers for records management still have a big hurdle to overcome on security and reliability for most respondents, but 23 percent might be more inclined to trust their existing paper records outsourcer or box store.

--  Less than 15 percent of organisations are including social postings in their records management regime, even though a third of those who do keep records have used them to resolve staff issues or customer disputes.

--  Forty-five percent of organisations plan to increase their records management spend over the next two years. Automated classification in particular is set for strong growth.

The full report, "Information Governance -- records, risks and retention in the litigation age," can be downloaded from the AIIM website at www.aiim.org/research. The research was underwritten by ASG, Axceler, HP Autonomy, Iron Mountain, Nuix, Recall, RSD, SAP and StoredIQ.