Ready ... or not?

• Position: IN FOCUS: A Message from the Editors - Editorial

With its recent announcement that it had lost e-mail records pertinent to an ongoing investigation and that staffers were using e-mail accounts outside its control, the U.S. White House was added to a long and rapidly growing list of organizations reporting that they have lost data or suffered an electronic breach. Unlike the White House, though, many organizations are subject to civil judgments and steep fines from regulatory agencies for their failures to properly manage their records.

Morgan Stanley, for example, was ordered to pay $1.57 billion in compensatory and punitive damages after the judge drew an adverse inference that the company's failure to produce e-mails requested for discovery was because the e-mails would have been harmful to the company.

In a data breach announced earlier this year, TJX Cos. Inc. reported that nearly 50 million customers' credit card information was exposed due to a security breach, and a disk containing the names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and birth dates of almost 3 million Georgians was lost in shipping. While it will be many months, or even years, before the company's financial damages are totaled, within a few weeks of the announcement, TJX said it was recording a fourth-quarter 2006 charge of .01 per share--which Information Week estimated to be a loss of about $4.5 million.

Each of these announcements, no doubt, has caused records and information (RIM) professionals to shake their heads incredulously at the idea that the business community--even large organizations--still is frequently not getting RIM right.

In her press briefing on April 13, White House Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino said one factor in the White House failure was that its policy was not clear enough and that it had not kept pace with technology, such as the widespread use of BlackBerry PDAs.

Politics aside, the White House case, as well as the others mentioned, illustrates the imperative for RIM professionals to play a leading and collaborative role in developing and implementing policies and procedures that are keeping pace with technology and changing business processes--and in driving and auditing compliance. Several articles in this issue will help.

In "R U Ready for IM?," Jesse Wilkins, CDIA+, writes that although instant messaging (IM) use in the workplace has many benefits, it also presents many challenges. Although--according to a survey from the American Management Association and the...