Yes, there are still paper files that must be managed and tracked, but these days, vast streams of electronic information flow through companies.Electronic data — on share drives, third party applications, e-mail, websites, and social media — creates a virtual mountain of documents and records that must be tracked and managed as well.

Organizations must keep up with all data and manage the various life cycle requirements of different types of records. Efficient data tracking and management is crucial to making the best possible use of resources, achieving cost efficiencies, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. But it’s a tricky business to achieve an optimal balance. Based on their 2010 “Information Management Health Check Survey” of 1,680 enterprises in 26 countries, Symantec Corp. found persistent pitfalls in the management of electronic records:

• 46% of organizations have a formal retention plan in place that would allow them to delete unnecessary information.   The flip side of this is that 54% percent do not.  This creates a culture of information hoarding and ultimately, greater expense for the storage of huge amounts of data that provides no real value to on-going operations.

• 75% of backup storage consists of infinite retention or legal hold backup sets.   Forever it seemed, General Counsel told employees to keep every single memo, email and scrap of paper in case of litigation.  Savvy advisors now realize that you may not want access to all of that, and you may not be legally required to.

• 65% of employees routinely create their own archives.  If your computer has ever crashed, you can certainly empathize with th
  ose who take matters into their own hands.  But the result from individual archiving is expensive to store and dangerous during eDiscovery.

How healthy is your electronic records management program?