By Noel Rath

AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) has produced an excellent report from their survey on "Email Management - the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" (© AIIM 2009, www.aiim.org) -- available at www.aiim.org/emailmanagement2009.

Here are some of the 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.
• “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 our 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% of organizations have completed an enterprise-wide email management initiative, with 20% currently rolling out a project. Even in larger organizations, 17% have no plans to, although the remaining 29% are planning to start sometime in the next 2 years.
• Some 45% 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% of those surveyed capture important emails to a dedicated email management system or to a general purpose ECM system. 18% print emails and file as paper, and a worrying 45% file in nonshared personal Outlook folders.
• A third of organizations have no policy to deal with legal discovery, 40% would likely have to search back-up tapes, and 23% feel they would have gaps from deleted emails. Only 16% have retention policies that would justify deleted emails.