E-mail Management: Key to Business Processes
E-mail is the most widely used software application in virtually every corporate enterprise. According to IDC, 35 billion e-mails are generated every business day, up from 10 billion just five years ago. And with new compliance-driven regulations in place, corporate e-mail messages have achieved the same status as other commonly used business documents.
Failure to manage e-mail can carry a costly penalty for corporate executives. Last year, former CSFB banker Frank Quattrone was sentenced to 18 months in jail for sending a single e-mail urging his staff to "clean up" their files. At a large software publisher, company policy required the destruction of e-mails older than seven days and the storage/archival of e-mail messages were kept to a minimum. The New York State Attorney General's office is following e-mail trails at several Wall Street firms suspected of wrongdoing.
With content expanding at a rate of 30% a year, many organizations are scrambling to add more storage capacity and build information silos to house the growing number of daily e-mails created at their firms. But, without the means for easily categorizing e-mail messages as business records or making these messages easy to retrieve, these organizations are creating "digital landfills"—holding onto every record while at the same time making it difficult to find the e-mail or attachment they really need. Retrieval costs have skyrocketed and the risk of not being compliant with certain regulations could outweigh the actual retrieval costs. And while the cost of storage is decreasing, the shear volume of e-mail messages drives the total cost higher and higher.
Destroying or deleting e-mails, which are considered business records, also can result in legal liability for companies, all the way up to senior corporate executives. Rulings from regulatory agencies encourage organizations to regularly disclose policies for e-mail management, but many popular e-mail software applications aren't equipped with features for enforcing compliance, leading some organizations to neglect or ignore their own policies. This practice can create enormous regulatory risk for the organization. Effective e-mail management solutions must support the entire e-mail lifecycle including the creation, retention, auditing, management and retrieval, as well as timely purging of e-mail through integration with electronic records management systems. If not properly managed, the sheer volume of corporate e-mail generated daily can dramatically impede an organization's growth and even threaten its ongoing viability.
Incorporating e-mail management into a comprehensive corporate enterprise content management (ECM) initiative helps ensure that all data and content relating to a particular issue can be easily saved as business records. Once preserved as a record, access and retrieval of e-mail content is simplified. This helps significantly reduce litigation costs, offering companies the opportunity to realize a return on investment of their e-mail management solution with the first legal discovery challenge they face.
E-mail Enablement
Effective e-mail management solutions also help organizations drive their business processes. E-mail content is often used to initiate business processes and improve decision-making, leading to streamlined business performance. E-mail management solutions that meet this challenge go far beyond just filling an organization's "digital landfill."
With effective e-mail management solutions, employees use e-mail for not only communication, but also as a workflow tool to track decisions, request approvals or collaborate on documents. Business decisions, official memos and other valuable records encapsulated in e-mail messages can provide organizations with a fixed record of business intelligence, transactions and decisions.
By enabling e-mail to be an active, intelligent part of a business process, e-mail management solutions can offer organizations enormous business process and performance benefits. These solutions create a system that encourages sharing business knowledge throughout the organization, increases productivity, and makes structured/unstructured content easily available in electronic formats.
FileNet Email Manager
FileNet Email Manager is the first solution that makes e-mail content an active element of a business's processes and performance. And it helps simplify and automate the process of declaring e-mail messages as business records for improved proof of compliance.
FileNet Email Manager is a server-based e-mail management solution that integrates with popular corporate e-mail systems like Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes mail servers and desktop applications such as Microsoft Office. Unlike other e-mail management systems, the FileNet solution enables organizations to use e-mail content to initiate business processes and use this content as an aid in the decision-making process.
FileNet's Email Manager is the only e-mail management solution that is integrated, automated and invisibly enforced. It offers seamless integration with FileNet's P8 ECM platform, tightly coupling e-mail with business-critical applications. FileNet Email Manager selectively captures e-mail content based on the value of the content as defined by business rules and automates the entire e-mail cycle. By leveraging FileNet's ZeroClick technology, Email Manager captures e-mail at the technology layer, eliminating user interaction and user-related error, helping to reduce time and cost factors.
FileNet Corporation (NASDAQ: FILE) helps organizations make better decisions faster by managing the content and processes that drive their business. FileNet Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions allow customers to build and sustain competitive advantage by managing content throughout their organizations, automating and streamlining their business processes and providing a full spectrum of connectivity needed to simplify their critical and everyday decision-making. Since the company's founding in 1982, more than 4,000 organizations (including more than three quarters of the Fortune 100) have taken advantage of FileNet solutions for help in managing their mission-critical content and processes.
Craig Rhinehart is an expert in e-mail management and is a veteran in the enterprise content management industry. He currently serves as an advisor/board member on the ARMA Electronic Record Initiative. Rhinehart has played a role in four successful corporate acquisitions, including IBM's acquisition of Tarian Software where he was vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing.