Industry research group AIIM just released the results of a study that warned that “a third of organizations have no policy to deal with legal discovery and 40% might need to search back-up tapes to find emails that could be relevant to litigation.”

The new 2009 AIIM survey found that 84% would have no way to justify why emails of a certain age or type had been deleted.

“In AIIM’s view, most organizations are only just waking up to the fact that among the deluge of day-to-day emails, are some that constitute important business records. These emails need to be recorded and retained as such.”

The reason I bring this up here is that there is no difference between email communications and social-network communications, covering blogs, wikis and other postings. It’s all electronic communications posted on behalf of organizations to conduct organizational business. Social network interactions are business records, too.

The question is, how soon before legal departments start getting the jitters over electronic communications beyond email?

There are also the accompanying management issues that also go with the storage and retrievability of electronic communications. Someone has to be in charge of discovering, storing and archiving these communications. Hardware needs to be made available, and managed.

The AIIM study observes that more than half of the respondents lack confidence “that emails related to documenting commitments and obligations made by staff are recorded, complete and recoverable… Only 19% have the facility to move important emails into a document or records management system, or a dedicated email management system.”

This, of course, is a nod to the study’s underwriters, but the findings also give pause to companies with intense and pervasive social networking activities. Can they retrieve discussions and communications from six, 12 , 24 months ago? What if important communications took place on an outside service such as Twitter?

Who’s in charge of all this information? And do they have the resources to manage, store, and archive it?