Wayne wrote:
"I have a feeling it's one of those statistics that someone came up with arbitrarily and it's just been accepted as fact over the years because it sounds about right."

A good point - though often with these kinds of statistics, it wasn't completely arbitrary but the source may not be as general or widely applicable as subsequent quotes make out.
 
For example, quiet some years ago I worked at a national archival institution which was a very early adopter of ERM software. During the progressive rollout of the system across the organisation, the project leader gave a presentation - noting some statistics about the content reflected in the system. 
 
In particular, he noted that about 75% of the e-records were emails.
 
Some years later, he commented on the number of times he'd seen quoted in various articles "email makes up approximately 75% of e-records created in organisations" - and he wondered whether that figure had come from his presentation... which was based on the content of an application that had (at that time) only been implemented for a few months in a single organisation...
 
I'm very interested to see what people are turning up, in the search for this study. There have been similar questions raised about the Business Continuty urban legend of 80%
 
 “80% of businesses affected by a major incident close within 18 months”
http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0440.htm
 
Records management risks and benefits are notoriously difficult to measure. I think this is why we are so willing to grasp onto any numerical data that "sounds about right" when trying to promote the importance of RM to senior managers - although no doubt rubbery figures will only undermine our cause in the longer term...
 
Regards
Sonya
 
Sonya Sherman
Cayman Islands




      

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