I am getting a bit perplexed (at best), a bit aggravated (at worst) by all the attention being paid to e-mail management of late. Why do people/companies believe that e-mail requires management, skills and training separate and distinct from the rest of enterprise content? If all your organization is worried about is its e-mail management, then fuggedaboutit, you're in better shape than most. I am not proposing that this is not an important business issue. But, if e-mail is the only form of business content that you do not have well managed, then sit back and relax. Bringing e-mail into control won't take much.
Whether viewing e-mail management from a compliance or knowledge sharing perspective, realize that the issue is larger than e-mail. The media/format of e-mail is not "special" enough to warrant specific approaches to management. (You may consider corporate guidelines for how/when to use e-mail. But that is a separate and distinct topic.) E-mail is nothing more than another form of business content, and, as such, should be subject to a common approach to content management – all business content, whether an e-mail message, Word file, PDF file, blog entry, wiki page, paper-based mail, file sent by FTP or recorded phone conversation. If there is no records management policy within your organization, no corporate compliance initiative, no enterprise search strategy, no content sharing/collaboration environment, than addressing these issues only for e-mail is way too little too late. If on the other hand your organization has a well-defined practice with regards to records, compliance, search and collaboration, then extending these to include content authored and/or stored in e-mail is fairly straightforward.
Consider two clients of mine, for whom I developed Enterprise Content Management strategies, which included e-mail. In one case, e-mail was poorly administered to begin with. Most e-mail was stored on C: drives, not subject to official back-up and recovery. Many were printing e-mails and storing them in paper files. When I asked how this compared to the approach used to manage paper files I was told that that did not matter, management was specifically concerned with e-mail. I pushed a bit harder and learned that the approach to e-mail was symptomatic of the organization's approach to controlling any form of content. Records management was a guideline, not a policy. Their e-mail project quickly grew in complexity and stature.
The other client also felt they needed to establish an e-mail management practice. In this case, there was a records management group that exercised control over many forms of content. Established policies were in place and enforced that governed things such as retention. Their solution was as simple as incorporating the e-mail files to the existing rules and review processes. But that realization did not come easily. When I first proposed that they take existing records policies and extend them to e-mail they looked at me as if I was crazy. "This is e-mail" they said. "No, this is business content" I retorted, Courts and regulators do not hold e-mail to a higher or lesser degree of scrutiny than any other form of content. It’s the subject matter of the content and its business purpose that governs the approach to management and control, not format or media.
Organizations can be easily confused. Some technology providers purport e-mail management solutions that address the situation singularly. While these products may work as a standalone solution, they create yet another stovepipe in the organization. Seek out solutions that can be leveraged throughout the organization and bring e-mail into compliance with the policies and procedures of the organization as a whole. Content filtering, security, search/retrieval and records retention should be deployed across media types and controlled by a centralized policy. If you take the myopic view, not only are you not establishing a centralized approach, but you leave yourself vulnerable to the next insurgence of electronic communication.
So if you believe you have to manage your e-mail take this as a wake-up call and take a broader view. If you find that your electronic content is in disarray then set up a system to address all content. But if you find it is truly just e-mail that you have to bring under control, then quit your whining, you are in better shape than you thought, and better than most other organizations.
And that is precisely why you will not see AIIM Market Intelligence covering e-mail and its management as a separate and distinct topic. Email will be covered, tangentially in many upcoming whitepapers and Market IQs (such as the Content Security IQ due for release in October 2007), but we will not focus on it exclusively only to lead misguided business and technology leaders further down the wrong path.
