Correspondence Management: Taking the Fast Lane from the Inbox to the Outbox

The value of correspondence management is more often than not overlooked and underestimated in organizations around the world today. And, in a world that is becoming more and more information-dependent for a variety of reasons—security, legal/regulatory requirements and organizational efficiency, to just name a few—just the opposite should be true. As more people become wired, the use of electronic communication to interact with any organizations, especially government agencies, is becoming more and more pervasive. Paperwork reduction mandates and pressures on achieving internal efficiencies also make electronic communication and responses increasingly necessary for public-service organizations.

Communication-enabling technologies have blossomed over the last decade, and have produced an enormous increase in the number of recordable communications that an organization produces. Parallel to this very positive development, however, a new difficulty in managing these communications has arrived: the more and more complicated issue of how an organization can actually keep track of the response process and the audit trail accompanying these new communication methods. The easiest solution—simply ignoring these new developments—is clearly unsatisfactory. Not only does this have potentially serious legal and regulatory implications for most organizations, but it also makes it substantially more difficult for the organization to keep effective track of its own relationships with contractors, constituents, government offices and other correspondents.

The concept of correspondence management has changed drastically in recent years, with the advent of email, Web pages and online forms. A correspondence management solution today will include these interactive forms of communication, as well as more standard forms of correspondence such as letters via post or fax. Paper documents cannot be ignored and should also be included as a part of an overall solution. An effective solution must also include strong security for confidential correspondence, workflow schedules to automate processes, the ability to integrate tightly with Microsoft Office applications, easy-to-use metadata management and high-powered search and retrieval functions to deal with the large volume of documents involved in any organization's correspondence.

Incoming correspondence comes in many different forms, such as Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, congressional inquiries, taskers, constituent requests, etc. The management of incoming correspondence and the formulation of accurate and appropriate responses may be a simple or a complex process, depending on the correspondent, the issue and the research required to provide a response. Regardless, this is a process that should be handled by an effective correspondence management system. So, what really makes up an effective correspondence management system?

Ease of Use
An enterprise content management (ECM) approach to correspondence management allows organizations to establish a secure, compliant and easily searched repository of all internal and external correspondence. Automating workflow processes is key in the management of all electronic and paper correspondence materials; the scale and magnitude of most any organizations' communications today dictates that most of the process needs to be accomplished with as little effort on the end-users' side as possible. The effective use of an information management program to streamline and automate routine work activities in this arena is also crucial.

The more difficult it is to capture and catalog critical organization material, the more likely it is that some of that material will not be captured...or if it is, it will not be cataloged correctly. The intake process is critical to the success of the effort, and any quality solution should encompass managing the overall correspondence intake process. It should be intuitive from the end-user's perspective to allow for easy access and retrieval on the back end. The records entry side of communications capture is critical to the overall success of the project—if the capture side is too complicated, time-consuming or clumsy, the efficiency of the initiative will be lessened.

Analysis
As well as being able to classify and track correspondence, a successful program will also give offices the ability to better manage and understand their communications. Understanding the concerns and issues facing constituents and businesses is crucial to the formulation of effective government policy and programs. Tracking the influx of correspondence communications, and managing the responses, can be overwhelming at first glance...and without a quality management system, it would be. A good system will not only make this task manageable, but will also give organizations the ability to mine the data collected to better understand trends, key communication points and issues through their correspondence. Knowing what kinds of questions people are asking can aid in creating better educational programs. Imagine how much more productive events could be if the location of major supporters could be easily determined. The importance of the ability to run reports and easily manage and understand the data being collected cannot be overlooked.

Search Capabilities
Strong search capabilities are crucial to managing and easily retrieving important correspondence data. Anywhere from hundreds to millions of correspondence documents may flow through an organization on a yearly basis. With that much information, managing the flow of information from initial receipt and capture, through internal use, cataloging and final correspondence document disposition, can be a very difficult and complex task. Any correspondence management system must be able to have rules applied to the capture of documents and must give the end-user the ability to easily search for and retrieve specific communications without wading through large amounts of non-applicable information. The methods used for classification and cataloging of this information are crucial to the ease of use in the search functions.