AIIM Europe, the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) association, has announced the results of its annual user survey. Taken in advance of the Info Ireland event in September, AIIM’s research indicates that 43% of Irish respondents have little or no confidence that emails related to commitments and obligations made by them and their staff are recorded, complete and recoverable. Responsibility for the process of email archiving is left to individuals in nearly one third of Irish organisations. Of the remainder, 48% rely on the IT department rather than the records or legal departments to perform this vital function.
According to AIIM, organisations remain very confused about the issue of handling emails as records, despite recent high profile investigations involving email evidence. The research also reflects a general lack of understanding of all non-paper record-keeping, with 39% not confident that their electronic information is accurate, accessible and trustworthy. Although there is much to be done, Irish organisations do compare favourably with the world-wide result of 44%.
These issues will be addressed at this year’s Info Ireland conference, which will take place at Dublin’s Burlington Hotel on 18 and 19 September 2007. It is organised by AIIM in association with PricewaterhouseCoopers. With this year’s educational theme “Tame Your Information Beast” in mind, industry specialists will deliver information and advice across the 2 days. Over 25 suppliers will demonstrate content, email and records management software along with document scanning and forms recognition systems. Registration for this free event is at: www.infoireland.net or call +441905 727600.
Speaking at the conference launch Ciaran Kelly, Partner, Performance Improvement Advisory Services, PricewaterhouseCoopers said:
“As the saying goes "information is power", however this is only true if the right information is being communicated (financial and non-financial) and that it can accurately measure organisational performance in a truly holistic manner.
In the past, Irish organisations overly relied on financial information to measure organisational performance, however in many cases this approach concealed the “worm in the apple” such as customer service issues, low levels of compliance, high level of staff turnover, poor operational performance and unmanaged operational risk.
However, it is now an emerging trend among many Irish organisations to leverage non-financial information to provide an indication of systemic issues or insights that may present long term strategic risks and opportunities.
Clearly financial information is still the corner-stone of performance measurement; however Irish organisations are increasingly measuring their performance using a balanced scorecard format to include financial and non-financial data”.
The annual AIIM survey researches the state of the market as indicated by responses from AIIM end-user members in Europe and North America
About AIIM
AIIM (www.aiim.org.uk) is the international association for Enterprise Content Management. It represents the Information Management community and supports the interests of users and suppliers of technologies and solutions used to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver information.
About PricewaterhouseCoopers
PricewaterhouseCoopers (www.pwc.com/ie) provides industry-focused assurance, tax and advisory services for public and private clients. More than 140,000 people in 149 countries connect their thinking, experience and solutions to build public trust and enhance value for clients and their stakeholders.
