Email is out of control of this we can be sure. The reason is that email has become the de facto standard for business communication. The 2009 AIIM Industry Watch on Email Management shows respondents citing “Sheer overload” reported as the biggest problem with email as a business tool, followed closely by “Finding and recovering past emails” and “Keeping track of actions. “ Survey findings show 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. This survey also found that 84% would have no way to justify why emails of a certain age or type had been deleted. Only 19% have the facility to move important emails into a document or records management system, or a dedicated email management system, and 45% of respondents are still filing their important emails in personal Outlook folders.
The problem is not going to go away any time soon, in fact it is expected to increase substantially. According to the Radicati Group, corporate users received an average of 18 MB of email per day in 2007; this figure is expected to grow to over 28 MB per day by 2011. If you consider that there are 260 business days in a year and do the math and base it on the 2007 figures– 18 MB x 260 business days = 4.6 GB of email per user per year, or for an organization of 1,000 employees, 4.6 terabytes of email per year to store, to search through, and in the event of discovery, to review and produce. Taking a different perspective, Radicati also found that users sent and received an average of 133 messages per day. That same math gives us almost 35,000 messages to be saved per user per year, or 35 million messages per year for that same 1,000-user organization. Now fast forward to 2011 and that storage figure seems overwhelming. So what can you do to manage it all?
First you have to understand the meaning of email management. Simply removing emails from the server and saving them to a repository is not enough. Email must be classified, stored, and destroyed consistent with your business standards and content management practices- just as with any other document or record. This means you need to include in your policy, as you do for other content, guidelines to help users determine what constitutes value and even a record. You might provide an example like - An email is considered and must be managed as a record:
• When defined by statute or regulation
• When it documents a business transaction
• When it supports a business decision
• When the attachment is a record
You also need to establish and maintain a set of guiding principles in support of your policy to strengthen the reason and importance of managing emails properly. The guiding principles for your email management initiative might include:
• Email belongs to the organization, not the individual (Unless otherwise dictated by legislation as in some European countries.)
• Email is a business tool
• Email should be used appropriately
• Email must be managed according to content and value to the organization
• Email should be stored appropriately
• Email is not a records series unto itself
• Email can be more than “correspondence”
• Different users may be treated differently according to role, requirements
• Email policies have to be followed and enforced
• Enforcement must be applied equally
Once these are established you will need to produce a set of processes or procedures on how the user will move selected emails and attachments from their email client into the appropriate repository locations and how they will find and retrieve them in the future. These processes and procedures should be simple and as intuitive as possible.
While this is not the silver bullet answer to this discussion, it is a solid first step. Once these are in place, you can then assess how technology can be applied to help automate and manage email based on your policies and principles. Perhaps you might consider using an email archive solution to capture and filter email or the integrated features of your Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Electronic Records Management (ERM) solutions enabling users to capture email and the attachments directly into the repositories. No matter what you do, you must do something to take control, minimize your risk and increase efficiencies related to email. If you are not sure where to begin, you might consider taking the AIIM Email Management (EMM) course found at www.aiim.org/training.
What say you? Are you ready for email management? Have you or are you now incorporating email management into your business environment and practices? We 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.
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