ARMA International 2008 Survey Executive Summary

The ARMA International Survey distributed to 9,329 member was completed by 1,062 individuals. The 11% response rate statistically validates the survey answers across the populous.

A majority of responders describe their job function in Records Management (75%) while legal/compliance made up 4% of responders and IT 2%, matching those who describing their job as a Corporate Executive. Responders not identifying with the survey pre-defined job functions (17%), reported their position in records, legal, and archiving most predominantly.

The largest group on "size of company" are those with 1,000+ employees. Companies with 100 employees or less are 19%; 101-1000 employees are 33% and more than 1,000 employees are 48%.

The largest represented industry is government (29%), followed by Finance (9%); Energy (7%) and Legal (6%); Manufacturing (6%); Utilities (6%).

Some significant findings from this survey:

• Half of survey respondents see a difference between the process of eDiscovery and Discovery
• 75% of respondents do not have a system that manages their content over the enterprise; only 16% of companies with 1,000+ employees have an ECM System and 26% of the same companies use a manual system.
• 62% of respondents do not have an e-mail archiving system; 20% of companies with 1000+ employees have an email archiving system.

Retention policies

• Corporate retention policies cover physical documents for 90% of respondents, electronic documents for 74% and email files for 59%. More than half (66%) of companies use the same retention policy for both physical and electronic documents.
• For physical documents about one-third (38%) manage their records according to their retention schedule; less than half (41% ) manage their email according to their retention policy; and only 20% of companies manage their electronic documents according to the schedule.
• 7% of companies have no retention policy in place.
• Legal and Records Management are the two areas in an organization that play a major role (76%, 88%) in defining the retention schedules.

Respondents overwhelmingly reported (72%) their email management is not under control and 68% reported e-discovery is not under control either.

E-Discovery

• Systems considered discoverable within most organizations are Email, Document Management Systems, Accounting Systems, Physical and Electronic storage. Current Enterprise Search systems allow users to look at Physical and Document Management systems the most.
• Half of survey respondents see a difference between the process of e-discovery and discovery. Noteworthy – half do not.
• Most discovery processes are handled manually (65%) and many are handled with software (41%) and 11% report they outsource the process.
• Legal, Records Management, and IT are the three departments most likely responsible for the discovery process and the Business Unit (31%) is often responsible as well. Respectfully, those four areas are always consulted about the process and for the most part are responsible for producing the responsive information during a discovery request. Interesting to note, 22% of companies report end-users are responsible for producing information. Most organizations consider it a multi-department team effort in approaching discovery.

As far as having an automated process for discovery, 54% of respondents do not know which types of repositories their organization has. Email, email archiving systems and document management systems topped the list for the types of repositories that had an automated process.

Considering discovery expenses, most respondents (82%) did not know how much their organization spent on discovery and they don’t know how much is spent per case.

Of those companies with 1,000+ employees, ten spent more than $50 million annually on discovery; 20 spent more than $10 million annually. For that same company size, 11 spent more than $1 million per case and five companies spend more than $10 million per case annually.

Interesting to note, most companies consider their risk level to be moderate and believe they will spend about the same on discovery in the coming year.

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