Information Efficiency Survey from Iron Mountain

According to a recent survey of 5,500 company records managers conducted by Iron Mountain, it sees that while improving core business processes make more successful organization, few understand how to improve them.

Iron Mountain's survey on business efficiency asked respondedents to weight the importance of improving processes through better information management against the current state of those processes within their organization. As you might imagine, few are happy with how their core processes run. Key findings include:

- 90 percent of respondents rank process efficiency as imperative to their business goals and to the overall success of their organization

- 93 percent of respondents are dissatisfied with their revenue-generating and business-support processes and/or are actively trying to improve them;

- More than half of respondents (58 percent) have not yet experienced a "trigger" event like an audit or lawsuit that would spur improvement of records and information management processes

- Three-quarters of respondents are managing their records and information themselves, but only 35 percent of the respondents believe their program is being used by everyone in the organization.

"Information drives businesses today and can be a real competitive advantage if managed properly and efficiently," said Sue Trombley, director of consulting for Iron Mountain. "It plays a vital role in the revenue-generating and core operational processes that keep organizations running. And it can provide valuable insight into not just your own organization but your customers, your industry, your partners and your competitors. The right policies and procedures, implemented across the entire organization, efficiently executed and regularly enforced, can give you a tremendous opportunity to unlock this advantage."