Vendors tackle electronic records retention

Bank of America's securities unit last week agreed to pay a record $10 million penalty to the Securities and Exchange Commission for record-keeping violations and failing to produce documents - in particular, e-mails - requested as part of an SEC investigation.

The fine is the largest imposed for a violation of this type, the SEC says. But it's not the first. In 2002, five Wall Street brokerages each accepted a $1.65 million fine for improperly storing e-mails.

Despite a string of corporate governance scandals related to archiving electronic documents, U.S. companies still aren't vigilant about handling such communications. Many have no policies in place for retaining and destroying e-mail, instant messages and other electronic content, according to a pair of professional organizations.

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) and the Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA) last week unveiled the results of a survey of 2,200 records managers. Among respondents, 47% say their company doesn't include electronic records in its retention and destruction schedules, and 59% don't have a formal e-mail retention policy.

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Bank of America's securities unit last week agreed to pay a record $10 million penalty to the Securities and Exchange Commission for record-keeping violations and failing to produce documents - in particular, e-mails - requested as part of an SEC investigation.

The fine is the largest imposed for a violation of this type, the SEC says. But it's not the first. In 2002, five Wall Street brokerages each accepted a $1.65 million fine for improperly storing e-mails.

Despite a string of corporate governance scandals related to archiving electronic documents, U.S. companies still aren't vigilant about handling such communications. Many have no policies in place for retaining and destroying e-mail, instant messages and other electronic content, according to a pair of professional organizations.

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) and the Association of Records Managers and Administrators (ARMA) last week unveiled the results of a survey of 2,200 records managers. Among respondents, 47% say their company doesn't include electronic records in its retention and destruction schedules, and 59% don't have a formal e-mail retention policy.

While certified records managers typically handle paper documents, the job of overseeing electronic records falls to the IT department, according to 71% of the survey's respondents.

Eager to help with corporate record-keeping practices are software and services vendors - many of which unveiled new wares at AIIM's enterprise content-management conference held last week in New York.

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Open Text, for example, announced plans to add instant-messaging capabilities to its Livelink collaboration and content management software suite. The company's new Livelink Instant Messenger, due this week, provides tools for creating secure, auditable instant messages. It supports common IM functions, such as displaying which colleagues are online and letting users personalize contact lists. Livelink IM gives users the option of retaining IM content, which the software then indexes to allow for subsequent searches and retrieval.