E-Mail Management: How to Succeed Step-by-Step

E-mail management has become mission-critical for organizations concerned with mitigating legal risk, meeting federal regulations and ensuring business continuity. According to Ferris Research, 35% to 60% of business-critical information is stored in personal messaging systems1. This information is unavailable as a resource to the organization, becomes a potential liability in a legal or audit situation, and creates mayhem for IT departments concerned with data back-up, recovery and storage. Various solutions are available to resolve this issue—one that every CIO and IT manager faces today. Following are some considerations when contemplating a solution.

The Business Issue

As “eBusiness” has become simply “business” over the past decade, e-mail has transformed from an easy new way to communicate to a prerequisite for conducting business. In fact, in a recent U.S. survey conducted by AIIM and Kahn Consulting, 100% of the 1,000 businesses surveyed use e-mail as an integral business tool to maximize productivity in the workplace2. Contracts are negotiated, orders are placed, Freedom of Information requests are made and employment offers are accepted, all through e-mail. These are all legal documents that need to be managed for legal, regulatory and business continuity purposes.

Formerly, IT departments archived e-mail and stored it for eternity...or instructed users to delete it to free up disk space. Recent court cases against Microsoft, as well as various brokerage houses, have seen verdicts hinge on e-mail. In U.S courts, e-mail is now considered an official legal document, the improper handling of which may result in hefty fines and even prison sentences. These circumstances have made it imperative that organizations take a new look at how they manage e-mail.

The Business Solution

E-mail management is a Herculean task that will require good business rules, training and a solution outside of your messaging system. But a successful program is indeed possible. By answering some questions, an enterprise can start to build a successful program:

• Which e-mails need to be managed or archived?

• How long should they be archived?

• How are the e-mails stored?

• The enterprise needs to comply with which requirements/mandates?

• How are attachments managed?

Next, several steps must be carefully considered. These include:

• Understanding the three components of an e-mail and their importance in a legal or regulatory situations - header/routing information, body and attachments;

• Involving C-level executives, legal, IT, records management and users in any decision process regarding a solution, as well as the processes to be established;

• Checking with the legal department and records manager to understand your industry’s legal requirements for e-mail management;

• Ensuring high compliance from end-users and management while meeting legal/regulatory needs by selecting a solution that: (1.) Integrates seamlessly into the current e-mail system; (2.) Allows users to easily transfer e-mail into the system; (3.) Provides various levels of security; (4.) Allows users to continue work as they do now without changing current habits; (5.) Manages the retention period of your e-mail; (6.) Provides easy and flexible search methods to retrieve e-mail; (7.) Enables users to add metadata when cataloging e-mail; and (8.) Captures incoming and outgoing e-mail;

• Recognizing that e-mail management at the desktop is the best way to ensure that what is captured is relevant and purposeful to the organization;

• Realizing that e-mail is a corporate record. It should be stored and managed in the same system as all other corporate records; and

• Training all users regarding the importance of e-mail management, basic records management and organizational policies.

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TOWER Software, a leading enterprise content management (ECM) provider, delivers electronic document and records management (EDRM) solutions. TOWER Software’s award-winning solutions empower organizations to manage and secure their vital information assets. The TRIM Context® solution is a single, integrated platform that manages business information throughout its complete lifecycle. By relying on its proven domain expertise, strong strategic partnerships and powerful solutions, TOWER Software enables organizations to improve the accuracy of information on which business decisions are made; maximize efficiency by finding business critical information more quickly and easily; and achieve and maintain standards compliance across industries, resulting in sustained competitive advantage. TOWER Software is a privately held company with operations in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. For more information, visit www.towersoft.com.

1 The Corporate Email Market, 2000-2005, Ferris Research

2 Managing Email in the New Business Reality, R. Kahn and B. Blai