This is a transcription of a presentation I gave to a recent conference on email management. The views expressed in it are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my organisation.
In January 2006 we introduced an email management policy to try to manage emails better within our ERM system. The loud noise you may be able to hear during this presentation is possibly the sound of the stable door slamming after the horse has bolted.
At the risk of mangling my metaphors, we called our email management project ‘Taming the email monster’ but I often wonder whether we should have called it, ‘Flogging a dead horse’.
I don’t think records managers have covered themselves in glory over the management of emails. As a profession we didn’t decide on our approach until it was far too late. We neither knew nor understood the impact email would have on all of our working lives; so now we are playing catch-up. And to be honest, I sometimes wonder if it may be too little too late. We are only now trying to change habits and working practices that people have developed over the last ten years or more. And it is an extremely difficult to thing to do. We may well be fighting a losing battle.
As records managers we were very slow to develop policies and procedures for managing email. We did not address the problem. And so everyone has now developed their own ways of working with email and may be extremely resistant to any changes we now wish to impose. One of our biggest problems is that most people now believe their email accounts belong to them and not to the organisation they work for.
The answer may well lie in using technology to help us rather than expending an incredible amount of time and energy trying to change people’s deeply ingrained working practices. We will undoubtedly have to keep our eyes fixed firmly on the horizon so that we don’t make the same mistake with future technologies as we did with email management. But, of course we don’t know what the IT / records management world will look like in three, four or five years time.
The organisations we work for need to be able to manage their records to understand the corporate memory but we have people working solely from their own email folders. And this information, saved in individual email accounts, is not accessible to the rest of the organisation. This means that there are often holes in an organisation’s knowledge bank. Individual members of staff know what is going on but the organisation may not. You end up with a lack of corporate memory; what I call Corporate Alzheimer’s Disease. The organisation’s corporate memory is sporadic, patchy and inconsistent. And this is not acceptable.
We need to bring in a corporate email policy addressing everything we need to do to manage email within our organisations. This policy has to include what to save as a record, retention scheduling, controlled access to data, protection of private information and how to manage your own email account. Done properly a corporate email policy will help your users to manage their email effectively and the inevitable result of this will be that your corporate memory will improve and your Outlook servers will not get overloaded.
When you devise your email management policy you will need to think about your strategy and how you will go about it. What are the possible solutions?
We identified three.
Limiting the mailbox size
One of the most effective ways of getting people to manage their email accounts is by limiting their mailbox size. You can force compliance by stopping them from being able to send or receive email if their mailboxes are above a certain limit. This will concentrate their minds.
Clean slate policy
The second option is to auto-archive everyone’s email accounts and give them all new, blank account which you expect them to manage properly from that point onwards.
Archiving emails after x months
The third option is to archive / delete emails that are over a certain age (usually 3 or 6 months).
With the last two options you have to make sure that your users have absolutely clear guidance on what they should save into your ERM system and what they should do with ephemeral emails. You must remind them regularly of their obligations.
As soon as you bring in any kind of email management policy you run the risk of people deleting stuff they are not supposed to delete. And anyway, you are absolving your users of their responsibility to manage their manage their records properly. They don’t have an incentive to do it if you are going to come along and do it for them. If you automatically archive email you still need to apply retention and disposal schedules to it. You won’t be able to spend the rest of your life going through every email you have archived so you would have to give your archived emails a very long retention schedule…which kind of defeats the object.
We decided on a policy of limiting the mailbox size as it seemed to be the best solution for us. Even with this solution you must educate and frequently reiterate what you expect people to do.
Our policy began in January 2006 and ran for six months until 06/06/06. D-day; or e-day as we called it. 666 is also the number the beast so we called it ‘taming the email monster’.
We had a clear programme of events with regular updates, information and newsletters. Each month we reminded people what they should do and by when. We wanted a people to get into the habit of managing their emails regularly. And a lot of people did it. And they were the ones who have subsequently told me that they now feel that they are in control of their emails – not the other way around. But, of course, not everyone did what we wanted them to do. If I say, ‘you’ll never guess what happened’, I think perhaps you will.
A high proportion of people left it until the last minute. And we had hundreds of people trying to move hundreds of thousands of emails on the last two days. No surprises then that our systems overloaded and fell over. Our marvellous IT staff gave us lots more server space in ERM and we were only down for about half an hour.
You must make sure you have rules for everything and that you communicate these rules regularly. You cannot afford to assume that everyone will suddenly change the way have been working for the last five or ten years just because you ask them to. You have to persuade, educate, cajole and, in some cases, be prepared to use the efficiency carrot and the compliance stick to get your users to do what you want.
We decided on a 200MB mailbox limit and agreed that everyone above this limit could receive but not send email after 06/06/06.
I think the policy has, by and large, been a success. The vast majority of people are managing their email accounts better. Some people have even thanked me because they are now in charge of their emails rather than the other way around. And some people have said, ’200MB is far too many you should get it down to 100MB’. Maybe I will.
We also managed to clear up a vast amount of space from the email servers. Our IT section thanked me for doing something they had been trying to do - but not succeeding - for years.
I’m sure that our corporate memory is much healthier than it was as we’ve got thousands and thousands more emails in our ERM system.
Conclusions
This is not the end of the story. Far from it. Managing emails effectively is, and it has to be, a process. One exercise won’t get people acting, thinking and working differently. It has to be an ongoing process of education, cajoling and re-enforcement.
There are other weapons in our armoury too. We need to be able to enshrine everything in our information management policy. This needs to seen as a set of instructions rather than as a series of guidelines. And the more you can automate these instructions the better.
But we also need our ERM systems to work smarter too. At the moment it is very ‘clunky’ to save emails into our ERM system. Drag and drop is OK but it is really a stop-gap solution, in my opinion. Ideally, the next generation ERM systems will link seamlessly to Outlook folders. Staff will put emails into their Outlook folders like they do now but they’ll really link back to the ERM system. And they really must be able to handle bulk drag and drop, because some people may want to put thousands of emails into the system...particularly if you bring in an email management system.
So we must be able to engage with the ERM suppliers and make sure they deliver what we need. We must not be passive recipients of their changes / upgrades etc; we need to let them know what we want and get them to deliver it without charging us an arm and a leg. There’s a commercial dichotomy that we have to get control of; our job is to manage our organisation’s records, their job is to sell you stuff. Somehow we have to get them to provide us with the tools we need when we need them at much more affordable prices.
We need to be alive to the challenges of the new technologies that are being developed at what seems to be breath-taking speed. We must develop strategies for managing instant messaging / Blackberrys etc. And the new Sharepoint technologies will give us ‘collaborative space’ and ‘records space.’ How will we manage these technologies? We need to get our strategies and solutions in place now - before we lose these battles too.
We must engage with the new ‘social computing initiatives’ like wikis and blogs. How will we treat them? As collaborative spaces or as record spaces?
Records managers in the 21st Century have to have a number of strings to their bow. And one of them has to be a greater understanding of IT. If we don’t we’ll be left trying to manage systems we don’t understand; trying to get to grips with systems, tools and processes that have evolved without us.
Which is exactly what happened with email management.
Our organisation has come a long way – but we still have to go a lot further before I will be happy that we’ve come to terms with managing the email monster. And we have to be constantly vigilant because other monsters lurk in the shadows.
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