Lost in the land of email

Have you ever tried to find an email from someone and can’t? You know it is there somewhere but you just can’t find it. You know you put it in a folder and are now using the find feature to search all of the folders in hopes it will surface from within the thousand you have kept. Aha! Find is now producing results and you still can’t find it but the list has been whittled down to a few hundred rather than thousands, so you begin to navigate through the sea of information, reading headers and subject lines looking for a hint that you are nearing your final objective. Find that email!

Now imagine you have to do this for reasons of Discovery. Your organization has been caught up in litigation and you have been requested to produce all email relevant to the case. Let’s take this a step further and add 1,000 more people, the size of your entire organization, and watch the frenzy begin. Once you think you have it all, you are questioned by the opposing Counsel as to the process you used to find these emails, are you certain that they are all here and by what means do you manage them? Uh oh, we might not be able to defend ourselves now as this line of questioning and the answers we provide could raise enough doubt to put us at a higher risk.

According to the Radacati Group, business users in 2007 received an average of 18 MB of email per day and this is expected to reach 28 MB per day by 2011. Now let’s calculate what this means overall. If you take the 2007 figure of 18 MB per user per day and multiply that by 260 business days, you end up with a figure of 4.6 GB of email per user per year. Now let’s say your organization is comprised of 1,000 employees. This figure for email now expands to 4.6 terabytes of email you have to store annually.  To make it a little easier to visualize, Radacati also found that users sent and received an average of 133 emails per day. Using the same calculations as before, we find that this equates to 35,000 messages per user per year or 35 million messages per year for the 1,000 user organization and if you are called into litigation, you will have to search through it all as part of the discovery process.

Email management is extremely important and like ECM, requires commitment, planning and cultural change in the way we deal with email. Email is information that needs to be addressed in the same way we deal with other business information. It must be captured, stored and managed the same as content or records are handled. It should be classified with a single “official” copy that can be accessed by authorized personnel from a repository. There needs to be Governance set and training for employees on how to properly identify, capture and store email. When the end of an email’s lifecycle is reached, as with any other content, it must be disposed of properly; all of this for the purpose of being able to find and share information of value and prove consistent practice when challenged. Actually

Many organizations know they need to address email but few have met the challenge head on. Email should be included in your overall ECM or EIM program and treated as content of value. Policy, process, training and tools need to be put in place and the changes to the organizational culture addressed to ensure a sound email management environment is established that is integrated with your overall ECM strategy and infrastructure.

What say you? Do you have email under control or are you lost in the land of email searching for direction and the ever elusive message? I want to hear from you and learn what you and your organization are doing.

Bob Larrivee – AIIM

Follow me on twitter – BobLarrivee and remember to visit www.aiim.org/training and www.informationzen.org, AIIM’s free social network created just for you.

Comments

[Bill Kirwin]

Right on. Email is the fastest growing form of unstructured data. It is also the de facto platform for communication and collaboration.
A point of data supports your statements on how difficult it is to "find" an email through search. Our surveys of 20000 workers show that 79% state that they often receive emails with vague or unclear subject lines.
We not only study the problems of email and info management, we provide training solutions as you recommend. See infoexcellence.com

[Ben Pitman]

Hi Bob

Good post

The company im currently at has only recently been established so we still maually archive our emails

But companies who are looking for a platform for email archiving, Mimosa Systems has been posistioned in the visionaries quadrant for email active archiving in Gartners 2009 magic quadrant.

Ben

[Scott Craig]

Great Post Bob! I am currently pushing for implementation of Classification tools and better management enterprise-wide. We do currently have ongoing training for email management as well.

Scott Craig
City of Cape Coral