ECM by Numbers

E-Discovery and Records Management Survey -1

Just a couple of tasters from this 28-page report that's going to be released on or around October 11th.

•  In the light of recent events such as the BP oil spill, the Toyota recalls, the banking crisis and high profile government email leaks, senior managers in 57% of organizations have become more conscious of the business risks of poor information management and records keeping.
• The priority given to records management has increased over the last 2 years in over 80% of organizations, and this is reflected in a planned increase in records management spend in over half of the organizations surveyed.

I know there are lots of records managers out there who might not see that reflected in their own status or budgets, but we are truly in a "golden age" for records management. Much more to come on e-Discovery, defending records policies in court,  and dealing with email. Watch this space.

PDF/A makes slow but steady progress

I've just completed a quick survey on the adoption of PDF/A. This is a preamble to some AIIM standards work on the next version which is called PDF/A-2 and includes improvements in file sizes, use of digital signatures and incorporation of multiple sub-files.

Looking at the survey results shows that whilst PDF is finally showing a lead over native file formats, the PDF/A archive format is lagging a little at 30% usage.  One reason for the slow uptake is the lack of generic output to PDF/A format in many content generation applications. There are, however, a number of back-file conversion projects going on to batch convert PDFs and TIFFS to PDF/A. It also seems that a number of regulated industries and government departments have yet to give the full go-ahead to PDF/A, even though it is a much more robust format for archive, with no external links allowed, and with additional capabilities for metadata.