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

For all federal agencies, FOIA dictates the need for an effective, secure and reliable correspondence management program. The need to collect, classify and easily retrieve information as related to legal actions, congressional inquiries or internal recognizance has become even more important—as well as the ability to respond to inquiries in a timely manner. A consistent and effective approach to reviewing incoming communications, including structured processes and the ability to create and manage document response templates, is crucial to being able to easily manage the information at a later date, and extract/import data as needed. In today's changing environment of electronic communication, government organizations are facing issues in maintaining the same level of control over the process, content and resulting records that are all key to the flow of official correspondence.

Correspondence Transmittal Tracking
Being able to manage and track correspondence and routing sheets is also a crucial measure of the ability of a correspondence management solution. An issue with some correspondence systems is the existence of redundant copies that increase storage cost. For example, it is common for many hundreds of individual FOIA requests to be made for the same document. With a one-to-one relationship, the system would treat each request as its own record. The more popular documents would be copied many times for each person who requests it and create more storage requirements for each request.

A smarter solution provides transmittal tracking, which allows a one-to-many relationship for the record. One copy of the material actually resides in the system, with many references to the various individuals that requested it. Not only should it capture the people, but the actual address it was sent to (not the address that is updated six months from now), what delivery method (i.e. fax, email, post, courier) as well as the unique serial number often used by courier firms. It is also helpful if the system generates the address labels as well for hardcopy distributions.

This one-to-many system is also ideal for tracking the distribution of brochures and forms. Monitoring the frequency of requests in a system like this is a great way to identify and monitor the changing interests of constituents, contractors or staff.

Risk Mitigation/Security
A secure, compliant and easily searchable repository is crucial for risk mitigation as well. No organization wants to risk contempt by being unable to produce correspondence communications. Crisis management today will assuredly encompass the ability to quickly and accurately retrieve data, communications and any information related to a specific issue whenever necessary.

The contents of any agencies' correspondence may contain items protected by privacy legislation—official responses are always governed by records and archive mandates—and other correspondence may be subject to FOIA requests. An inability to manage this information greatly increases an organization's exposure to risk. The head of any government agency is ultimately accountable for managing this information and will not want to be in a position where their staff is unable to produce critical information, which could bring even greater internal scrutiny. The ease of the e-discovery process to find and authenticate important correspondence information is crucial to being in compliance with any information requests.

Federal agencies that have recently been told to produce all Hurricane Katrina-related communications have been working to collect and produce all of these communications as part of a federal inquiry. The amount of communications alone makes this a difficult task, but to produce these materials in a timely manner and to be able to efficiently produce and authenticate these communications is crucial to an organization's ability to manage and mitigate the risk of "lost" or untracked communications. For just this one inquiry, the labor cost alone would justify the investment in a system to make future inquiries a simple process that immediately provides an accurate and authentic list of records. The sooner the process begins, the sooner the organization can reap the benefits.

For the agencies that already had an effective correspondence management system set in place before Katrina, the management processes that were applied to their correspondence prior to such a hectic crisis response significantly reduced the workload of the discovery effort after that response. Trying to manage the sudden influx of correspondence and communication materials during a crisis and after is much more difficult than being prepared and ahead of the game before a crisis occurs.

The importance of being able to manage the correspondence flow within any organization cannot be overstated. The ability today to add efficiencies into your correspondence management—to save money, time and valuable resources—makes practical and economic sense. And in any political environment today, agencies can't afford to not be doing everything they can to protect themselves from both a security and cost perspective. High-quality security, easy integration with current business systems and strong efficiencies are all available today and can be brought to bear to solve correspondence management issues in small or large organizations. It's just too important to ignore.

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TOWER Software(www.towersoft.com), the world's leading enterprise content management (ECM) provider to government and regulated industries, delivers award-winning electronic document and records management solutions. Our product, TRIM Context 6, provides organizations with a compliant, secure and accurate correspondence management solution. TRIM Context 6 is a single, integrated ECM solution capable of managing and securing the full range of corporate information assets throughout its complete lifecycle. In a single application, it incorporates: document management, email management, Web content management, collaboration, process management and records management. Our zero-footprint Web interface—ice—reduces risk by making enterprise deployment faster and more consistent.