New research from Recommind has revealed a clear disconnect between the headaches caused by email overload and the budget set aside to deal with it.
The survey, carried out by Vanson Bourne, quizzed 200 CIOs and IT directors at a wide range of UK enterprises. It found that 36% described email overload as their biggest day to day information management pain point. That figure rose to 41% at companies with more than 3,000 employees.
Email management was followed by document and content management (28%), information access controls (15%), compliance (13%) and, perhaps surprisingly, social media bringing up the rear on just 8%.
However, when asked where they would be focusing the majority of their information management budget in 2011, just 16% said email management. Document management and enterprise search systems came out on top (43%), followed by ensuring regulation compliance (30%). Social media and knowledge-based networking was bottom with 11%.
One of the more surprising aspects of the result was the impact social media is having on businesses and their information management strategy. Just 8% of respondents claimed the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter were causing issues; down from 35% when this survey was first conducted a year ago.
At a roundtable held in London to discuss the findings of the research, Mark Surguy, partner at law firm Eversheds, said he expects that figure to increase once more. "Last year’s numbers suggest an initial panic about social media which has now died down. But it is a relevant form of record and I expect bigger things in that space this year."
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Social media also came bottom when respondents were asked to list what they considered to be the biggest risks associated with corporate information. Just 28% said that was a worry, well behind cloud and hosted data (35%), compliance and regulatory investigations (46%) and fraud and data breaches (83%).
The increasing amount of legislation and regulation entering the UK has resulted in data protection becoming a much bigger issue for businesses, the report found. 71% said of respondents said they had started to re-thing their information risk strategy as a result.
Howard Sklar, senior corporate council at Recommind, said while this is no doubt good news, there is still confusion over where the responsibility for this lies. "It has to be a mixture of the compliance, IT and information management teams," he said. "It’s difficult to know who to talk to at these companies. All departments have different needs and different budgets. Knowledge of the law and the technology to deal with it has to be combined."
Craig Carpenter, VP and general counsel at Recommind, added: "It’s often a mixture of IT departments and legal departments, depending on who has the issue. For proactive companies we often deal with the risk or IT departments. For reactive companies it’s generally the legal teams."
The survey was carried out to mark the one year anniversary of the InfoRiskAwareness project. Backed by Recommind, OpenText, Eversheds and others, it was launched with the aim of raising awareness of all aspects of information risk. It features resources such as white papers, best practice guidelines and event information.
Carpenter told CBR that although awareness of the project had been "slow" to begin with, it had picked up over the last six months or so as companies begin to look at their information risk strategy as a result of increased regulation here in the UK.
