Introducing the Pulse of the Industry Report 2022

The records and information management industry is undergoing significant transformation, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

To keep up with the pace of the change, records and information management professionals need to create or update their strategies so they align with those of their business, embrace new tools such as AI and ML, and do a better job of championing records management as a whole.

These are some of the key findings from our Pulse of the Industry Report 2022, created in partnership with the Records and Information Management Professionals Australasia (RIMPA).

This is the first report of its kind dedicated to the Australian and New Zealand market and provides the opportunity to establish an ongoing annual benchmark. The survey went out to RIMPA members in May 2022, and the final report was presented at RIMPA Live 2022.

Change has come from multiple directions, from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, to the adoption of new data sources, and the general growth in data.

We’re all searching for answers

Have you asked yourself these questions?

• How does my organisation rate when it comes to compliance or data management?
• What does everyone else’s tech stack look like?
• Are we behind in moving to the cloud?
• After the pandemic, do I have more or less control of the information I am responsible for?

You’re not alone. These are questions the industry as a whole is grappling with, and the results of the survey show there is a lot of work to be done.

Key challenges facing the industry

The results show records and information management professionals are struggling to integrate their work with the rest of the business. There is limited knowledge of the impact of their work, and more than half of respondents were unaware of their budget. Forty percent of respondents reported their information management strategy was “poor or needs improvement”.

Meanwhile, it is becoming difficult to capture all the relevant information in a hybrid workplace age. The vast majority (86%) of respondents’ organizations use Microsoft365, but not exclusively. The range of sources of data has rapidly increased due to the adoption of new remote work tools as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and raised curly questions like, “is a Teams channel for coordinating a project filled with official records?”

Following on from this, 98% of respondents have little or no expertise with AI and ML. With the quantity of organizational data growing significantly, along with a corresponding increase in complexity, the scale of the problem is definitively beyond a manual approach. Records and information management professionals need to embrace these tools if they want a hope of keeping up.

‍