South Africa has topped a list showing the number of companies per country believing that more than one in five e-mails sent by their employees are not work-related.
In general, one in four companies believes that more than 20% of its e-mail traffic is non-work related, according to the survey commissioned by Hitachi Data Systems. In South Africa 74% of companies — three out of four — agreed on this point.
The survey also uncovered wide variations between each of the 14 countries surveyed in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with workers in some countries sending up to 10 times more personal e-mails than their peers in other countries.
Israel made the second place on the list, with 67%, followed by The Netherlands with 54%, Austria with 47% and the United Kingdom with 32%.
France scored the lowest with only 7%, preceded by Italy and Belgium, both with 9%.
Apart from the impact on productivity, the survey highlights the cost and technology implications of storing non-work-related e-mail messages.
With new regulations encouraging companies to archive all e-mail messages for at least three years, personal e-mail traffic places an additional strain on data storage systems. Analysts already forecast that the total number of e-mails sent daily worldwide will grow from 9,7-billion in 2000 to 35-billion in 2005.
Despite this, the research suggests that most companies are failing to address the problem of archiving growing volumes of e-mail data.
“Since most companies are reluctant to place draconian e-mail restrictions on their staff, they need to look at ways of storing e-mail content more efficiently,” says Fanie van Rensburg, MD of Shoden Data Systems.
“With new e-mail archival regulations on the way, companies that fail to do this are likely to find themselves with a very large storage bill.”
Across the region, three-quarters of information technology directors questioned agreed that e-mails take up more than 5% of their companies’ entire data storage capacity.
However, a quarter of respondents reported that more than 20% of their stored data was from e-mail messages, while one in 10 put the figure even higher, at up to 40%.
In South Africa, 63% of companied reported more than 10% of storage capacity dedicated to e-mail — well above the average survey figure of 47%.
“This research displays the impact of e-mail storage — how it takes up large amounts of expensive IT resources and places a growing strain on IT directors everywhere,” said Van Rensburg.