by Barry Murphy.

While market drivers like compliance, eDiscovery, and risk management get a lot of press (and point to great opportunity for records management), the fact is that many organizations are not ready for full-blown RM programs. Why? Mostly due to organizational immaturity — not correctly aligning roles, responsibilities, and budget ownership (for more on this, click here). But there is also the problem of mutliple repositories containing records; organizations struggle with the question of moving records to a central repository or investigating federated RM.

Today, most organizations approach retention by content repository – in most cases, email is addressed first, along with other important systems of record, like imaging. Because it’s easier to start with the simple retention capabilities of an email archive, organizations can put off larger RM decisions until their email implementation is complete and they have digested the learnings involved. So, that has been something of a growth inhibitor for RM in the short-term. It won’t be long, however, until RM moves into the infrastructure level and gets deployed at that level – policy management across the ECM infrastructure instead of RM being an app on top of infrastructure. So, in the longer term, expect to see a greater uptake in RM.

We’re interested in hearing from you about RM efforts. Is federated RM working?  Are you drowning in too much retained information? Are eDiscovery costs growing out of control?  Send me an email at bmurphy@forrester.com and we can talk through the issues.