Electronic Records Management: File This Under ‘More Work Needed’

Thanks to the ubiquity of e-mail and software for seemingly every aspect of work, more business records are digital. But experts say most companies don’t have adequate systems for managing them.

When it comes to storing electronic business records, most companies do a less than adequate job, and that’s putting it mildly, experts say.

Blame it on not caring or spending enough, or on technology for electronic records management not being good enough. Either way, “most implementations are failures,” says Tod Debie, a one-time product manager for a major electronic records management vendor.

Debie’s is an extreme view. But industry analysts and other experts agree that a majority of companies, from Fortune 1,000 enterprises to small businesses, don’t have the electronic records management systems or policies they need.

And they do need them.

E-mail has become an important source of business records, and companies are drowning in it, contributing to an estimated 210 billion messages sent every day worldwide, according to Radicati Group, a Palo Alto, California, technology market researcher. Radicati predicts that this year, workers will spend 41 percent of their day handling e-mail.

E-mail gets the spotlight, but electronic business records include any documents that companies need to keep for legal, regulatory or continuity purposes, such as personnel files, contracts and the like.

Electronic records management systems can make it easier for companies to comply with “e-discovery” rule changes that took effect in 2006, making e-mail and other digital data subject to disclosure in federal lawsuits. The systems can also assist companies in health care, insurance, pharmaceuticals, finance and other industries that are required to retain business records for a set time.

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Source: Workforce Management
By: Michelle V. Rafter