A study detailing research into the deployment and enforcement of document retention and deletion policies is now available. According to the study, enterprises in diverse industries are experiencing a large gap between theory and practice when it comes to document retention and disposal.

Based on the responses of 108 IT professionals, the study indicates that only 62 percent of the companies surveyed have a document retention policy in place. Of that 62 percent, only 31 percent actively enforce the policy and 61 percent responded that fewer than half of their employees are adhering to their published retention policies. Given that 80 percent of corporate documents typically exist on individual hard drives, according to another CXO Research Services Group study, document retention and deletion polices are failing to account for most of an organization’s documents.

"The overwhelming majority of document retention polices are not working where they are needed most, at the desktop," says NextPage CEO Darren Lee. "We see this failure primarily as a result of two factors: first, end-users are simply unaware of the number of copies and different versions of company documents residing on their hard drives, in their email archives or on removable storage devices; and second, adherence to many document retention and deletion policies requires help from technology and end-users haven’t had any tools to make compliance to the policy possible."

Highlights of the study include:

• Only 30 percent of respondents had actually implemented technology to facilitate the retention and disposal of documents across their enterprises
• One-third of the companies surveyed did NOT have a document retention policy in effect
• The two areas of document retention that organizations felt they were weakest were:

  1. Implementing a standard document retention policy for the organization

  2. Policy-based document disposal (destroying documents according to a standard policy)