A new survey of 200 CIOs and IT directors within large UK organisations, sponsored by Recommind, has found that more than one third 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

Reccomind says the 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.

“The disparity between the real issues that CIOs are facing, and the way that budgets are being allocated, is concerning,” commented Simon Price, European director at Recommind.

“The buzz surrounding social media and the risks associated with it will no doubt continue to dominate headlines, and it is of course important for organisations to have policies in place to manage and control information that can potentially be spread via Web 2.0 channels, however these results show that social media is only a minor part of the greater information management challenges organisations are faced with on a daily basis.”

“It’s encouraging to see that so many organisations are reassessing how they mitigate and control information risk,” continued Price.

“Email has become such a big part of our day-to-day working lives that its impact is often underestimated. If and when firms are faced with an investigation or an eDisclosure request, retrieving the necessary information from email creates a huge amount of work, not to mention business disruption and waste of valuable employee time. When it comes to information governance, it is essential that companies focus the appropriate amount of resources on these big, everyday issues to ensure they don’t fall foul of the regulations at a later date. These research findings clearly show that fixing email management is an issue that needs to be promptly readdressed.”

UK organisations continue to cite fraud and data breaches as the biggest dangers to corporate information (83 percent), with compliance and regulatory investigations coming in second at 46 percent. In order to address these issues, 43 percent of those surveyed are focusing the majority of their information management budgets on document management and enterprise search systems.

For more information on the survey results visit http://inforiskawareness.co.uk/