Thinking of E-mail as an Opportunity, Not as a Threat: A New Strategic Imperative?
E-mail: love it or loathe it, it's here to stay. Although e-mail is widely considered to be the definitive communication tool of our time, many organizations see e-mail as nothing but a burden, a challenge and a downright nuisance. Organizations do face a staggering and increasing amount of e-mail messages, along with the high costs associated with system maintenance, storage and archival and infrastructure. Regulations and compliance legislation threaten everything from suspended business operations to jail time for executives. With all this negativity connected to e-mail, how can anything good come of it?
How about: business process improvement, risk mitigation, improved individual and team productivity, controlled storage costs and extending the value of your investment in Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes to generate competitive advantage? In other words, what if e-mail is an opportunity, not a problem?
Organizations attempting to address the rampant challenges of e-mail must make a fundamental shift in the way they approach e-mail management. Beyond addressing the need to manage storage, archival, retention rules enforcement and other compliance measures, organizations must embrace the concept of e-mail as a strategic imperative.
E-mail Challenges: Who's Affected?
Obviously one of the biggest challenges faced by organizations today is how to manage the onslaught of e-mail messages. According to a recent IDC research report, more than 9 trillion e-mail messages will be sent this year. That's up from 2.5 trillion in 2000. Given this, IT departments are forced to plan, budget and cope with e-mail in order to ensure business continuity. The administrative overhead is considerable, but without proper storage and backup infrastructure, archival strategies and adequate systems to ensure relatively reliable performance, the very ability to conduct business is at risk.
From a business operations management perspective, the challenge is not managing system performance and storage but ensuring the security and accessibility of e-mail and "quality control." Gartner estimates that close to 35% of all e-mail in organizations today can be classified as "occupational spam"—junk e-mail delivered to corporate accounts or e-mail unrelated to business operations.
In terms of volume, organizational leaders are concerned with ensuring that only business-related communications are retained and assuring access by only those that should have it. Failure to address these challenges results in unnecessary costs and, worse still, jeopardized intellectual capital.
Finally, users themselves struggle with high e-mail volume. In a recent survey of its members, the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) found that workers spend anywhere from 25% to 70% of their time working with e-mail and associated attachments. E-mail tasks vary: simply reading an e-mail; opening and reviewing attachments; contributing knowledge or other input; responding and forwarding the message to others; tracking deliverables; and organizing e-mail messages.
Rules, Regulations and Risk
Regulatory compliance represents one of the most pervasive challenges for organizations today. Proper treatment and management of e-mail is certainly a big part of ensuring compliance to Sarbanes-Oxley, NASD, SEC, FDA, HIPAA, DoD...and the list goes on. Virtually every organization is affected by some form of governmental or self-imposed regulation. Shockingly, though, close to 50% of the largest companies in the US have no formal policies in place for e-mail retention and deletion. With stiff fines and even jail time being the consequence of noncompliance, proper and documented e-mail management policies are no longer a choice.
Whether they like it or not, IT has become the official keeper of important electronic records. Of course, customer records, financial filings, legal documents, e-forms and other documents generated in Microsoft Word and other standard productivity software all fall under this category, but so too does the enormous amount of e-mail.
No longer is the role of IT with respect to e-mail isolated to mailbox-size-limit enforcement, system performance and maintenance and storage. Frequently, IT personnel are called upon to deliver evidentiary e-mails. IT struggles with implementing systems that ensure the e-mails required for compliance or litigation purposes are available in short order.
Business operations management is affected by regulations, policies and risks perhaps more than the other "constituents" of e-mail. Management is responsible for identifying and ensuring that proper policies are in place to ensure compliance with employee privacy, accountability and other regulations. In their seminal book E-Mail Rules, Nancy Flynn and Randolph Kahn, Esq., state that second to e-mail volume, it is litigation, regulations and audits that drive business to establish formal e-mail retention and management policies. Judges don't think highly of "I don't know" as a response to inquiries regarding the location of electronic records.
Beyond legislative requirements surrounding e-mail retention, organizations are implementing policies for the treatment of e-mail to curb storage and archival costs and streamline processes. It is estimated by Flynn and Kahn that close to 75% of business content, including e-mail, unnecessarily clogs business systems. These bottlenecks seriously impact the smooth running of processes throughout the enterprise and lead to the incurrence of unnecessary investment in media, storage, time and resources.
Lastly, users are faced with having to interpret organizational and regulatory policies with respect to e-mail. This presents significant risk factors to organizations and a high degree of inefficiency among users. The risk to the organization stems from the fact that users are often left to their own devices when it comes to retaining e-mail. It is all-too easy to hit the "delete" button rather than properly profile and store the e-mail message in a repository. This is not to say that users are entirely to blame, but only that they often (and understandably) struggle with what needs to be kept and what can be tossed.
Inefficiency and Productivity Issues
As if all this weren't enough, organizations are also faced with the ever-present need to improve efficiencies and productivity across all business processes. How organizations work with and manage e-mail is no exception.
Using traditional archival strategies, IT can spend weeks trying to drudge up e-mails for an audit or legal matter. This may be necessary, but it is not highly productive. As IT becomes a highly strategic element of the business, they don't wish to be seen as the "bounty hunters of lost e-mail."
IT is also challenged by the requirement to control costs of e-mail management hardware and for ensuring that policies are implemented to ensure the availability of systems, including e-mail, vital to the business. Otherwise, they risk the slowing—or ceasing—of business processes and overall productivity. E-mail has become an important communication tool; without systems in place to ensure its availability, business can grind to a halt.
Business operations managers love the way that e-mail enables them—and the entire workforce—to conduct critical business in a cost-effective, highly efficient manner. But they also know that many users spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with non-critical e-mail-related tasks.
But users suffer the most when it comes to e-mail in terms of productivity and inefficiency. Beyond responding to e-mail, users are forced to work across various business systems to interact with teams, share knowledge, find related information and deal with other "fallout" associated with e-mail. Understanding what e-mail to keep and what to dispose of is a challenge, and proper training in records management and regulations can be arduous and time-consuming. Users see e-mail as a benefit in terms of ease of use, speed of delivery and its effectiveness as a communication vehicle. But users also see e-mail management as an unnecessary burden, confusing and, quite frankly, a waste of time. The implications of e-mail mismanagement are not always evident to users and, therefore, they often spend more time than necessary in ensuring they do their part for adhering to policy and regulation.
A Framework for Strategic E-mail Management
Back to the central question: "How can organizations address the myriad challenges posed by e-mail while taking advantage of some of the opportunities it offers? What is really required to count e-mail as an asset rather than a liability?" Progressive organizations are thinking about e-mail beyond finding storage systems and ensuring that it is retrievable when the need arises. Leading organizations are treating e-mail as an integral part of broader enterprise content management strategies. That is, they are treating e-mail for what it is—a critical element of business content. In thinking about e-mail, organizations should consider the following as the core "building blocks" of a strategic approach:
1. Infrastructure—IT departments need to implement high volume storage and archival systems that are future proof. This means hardware and archival solutions capable of handling the need to retain large amounts of e-mail messages that are "tagged" for quick and easy retrieval if need be. Without robust storage and archival systems, "live" e-mail systems suffer from poor performance and business continuity is threatened.
In terms of e-mail retention policies, a flexible system that facilitates both automated rules (unobtrusive application of retention rules at the server side requiring no effort on the user's part) and user-initiated retention (drag and drop to content folders or archival system folders) is a must.
2. Interface—The way people interact with e-mail is of highly strategic importance. According to AIIM, workers spend between 20% to 60% of their time in the e-mail environment. The e-mail interface must reflect an understanding on the organization's part of how much of the workforce's day is spent in it so that the highest degree of productivity and efficiency is achieved across the enterprise.
Beyond simply sending, receiving and reading e-mails, users want to interact on a much wider scale. Team collaboration tools, instant messaging, and, most importantly knowledge management functionality should be made available from the e-mail interface. ECM capabilities presented in the e-mail environment would avoid users having to work across systems, learn new software interfaces, and would generate enormous gains in productivity and efficiency.
In order to truly establish e-mail as a strategic element of the enterprise, a unified interface—presented in the familiar Outlook or Notes environment—that offers users not only e-mail capabilities but also knowledge management, team collaboration, instant messaging, business query and reporting and other ECM functionality is a prerequisite.
3. Future proofing—The technical and cultural implications of this concept can be staggering. "Strategic e-mail management" is not something you are going to buy in a box, install on a server and your problems will be solved. Tackle your core issues first but keep in mind the end goal.
Whether you consider e-mail to be a lifesaver or a burden—or both—it is not going away. While some (especially vendors that build solutions that address particular aspects of e-mail) are focusing on the risks, threats and catastrophic consequences of not properly managing the storage of e-mail, progressive organizations are looking at the tremendous opportunities associated with embracing a more strategic approach. By ensuring a proper infrastructure for storage, archival, rules-based e-mail capture, and straightforward retrieval, organizations are only part way there. An e-mail-based ECM environment that permits not only sending, receiving and reading of e-mails but true interaction—including team collaboration, instant messaging, information search and retrieval and knowledge discovery—will deliver a host of valuable and tangible benefits to the enterprise.
Hummingbird Ltd. is a leading global provider of enterprise software solutions, employing more than 1,450 people in 40 offices worldwide. Hummingbird Enterprise™ 2004 is a state-of-the-art integrated enterprise content management platform that enables organizations to securely access and manage business information such as documents, records, e-mail or financial data. Please visit: Hummingbird.