Regardless of the final form the Wall Street bailout takes, one thing is certain. There will be an awful lot of politicians of both stripes running around demanding to "take names" and to know "exactly who knew what and when they knew it." There are certain to also be an awful lot of lawsuits flying around.
This will be a challenging time for records and information management in the financial community. The holes in information management practices (and we all have them) are never more evident than when crisis strikes. Can we clearly document who knew what ... when ... and how did they know it? The answer is often not pretty when the bright light of a courtroom or a congressional hearing shines on our internal processes.
The other thing that often happens when crisis strikes is that mistakes are made that can often make or break a company (just ask Arthur Andersen).
All this got me thinking about a few questions from our State of the Industry survey earlier this year.
I thought I would take a cut of the data just from the perspective of the banking and insurance industries (150 companies in all, 71% with more than 1,000 employees and 66% in the US).
So here goes. Here are a few questions and the breakouts for the banking and insurance industries.
My take: With over 40% of companies reporting only marginal effectiveness in managing electronic information and over 40% reporting only marginal confidence their electronic information is "accurate, accessible, and trustworthy" clearly there are some challenging times ahead.
On a scale of 1 (TERRIBLE) to 10 (excellent), please rate the overall effectiveness of your organization in managing, controlling and utilizing electronic information. N=150
- 43% would grade their companies as a 5 or less.
- Only 16% would grade their companies highly -- 8, 9, or 10
Imagine that your organization is sued by a former customer or constituent and must produce all the organizational information related to that person [not that this would ever happen in the current environment!]. Approximately how long do you believe that would take? N=112
- 7% = less than one day
- 30% = less than one week
- 38% = less than one month
- 19% = one to two months
- 6% = more than 2 months
How confident are you, that if challenged, your organization could demonstrate that your electronic information is accurate, accessible, and trustworthy? N=112
- 12% = very confident
- 25% = quite confident
- 22% = confident
- 30% = slightly confident
- 11% = not confident at all
How confident are you that emails related to documenting commitments and obligations made by you and your staff are recorded, complete, and retrievable? N=113
- 12% = very confident
- 13% = quite confident
- 27% = confident
- 30% = slightly confident
- 18% = not confident at all
For more information, contact John Mancini or Beth Mayhew.
Quotation of the above statistics permitted with the citation "AIIM" or "www.aiim.org"
