2009 Records Management Survey

Conducted by Crown Records Management, the 2009 Records Management Survey is Crown’s first annual global survey of records management professionals.

Over 100 records management professionals in 40 cities across 14 countries, across a wide range of industries, responded to questions ranging from destruction and imaging services to retention strategies and business continuity planning. Almost half of the respondents are employed at organizations with less than 100 employees. 27% work at companies with 100-499 employees and the remaining in companies with 500 to more than 10,000 employees.

Summary:

• The majorities of respondents (65%) have Retention Programs in place but tend to leave their strategies unchanged unless there are new compliance requirements or corporate policy directives.
• 80% percent of the respondents have a formal Business Continuity Plan (BCP) in place or are in the process of creating one. Individual responses indicate that some records managers do not know if their organization has a BCP which would indicate that these organizations may benefit by integrating their broad BCP with their records management and retention strategies.
• Consistent with increased regulation and data privacy concerns, more than a tenth of respondents specifically sited data confidentiality and security as a top concern in managing their records program. Another tenth cited the time that’s required to manage the program and another tenth, motivating, training and educating their staff and superiors.
• Half of the respondents said they are using electronic data storage services and just over a quarter said they only use “hard copy” storage services. Individual respondent comments cited a need to use a mix of both hard copy and electronic storage solutions as part of their overall records management strategy.
• 41% of respondents who were asked about scanning and imaging said that they are only managing “hard copy” records. 31% have done “back-file” conversions and only 12% have done “day forward” conversions for newly-generated documents.
• A great percentage, 75% of those that do use scanning and imaging services, said that they manage it in-house.
• When asked about what services would improve their Records Management program, reducing overall storage costs and confidentiality/securing outdated records were the top two responses (65%).
• The most frequently cited response to improving IT efficiency was “Data and image back up,” which are critical to risk management strategies.
• While transitioning to electronic data storage and risk management issues go hand in hand, the responses indicate that companies will first implement an imaging and hosting program and then formalize their retention strategy before addressing their broader business continuity planning.

You can download the full results here.