Managing the email monster
Managing the email monster
It may look like a simple envelope, but email is as dangerous as Godzilla if left untamed.
In classic monster B-movies, the grizzly monster develops in secret, out of sight and to grotesque proportions - only then can it unleash its terror on the unsuspecting public. King Kong lived un-discovered in the African jungles, Godzilla on a remote Asia-Pacific island, and email resides on the back office servers.
Like the movie monsters, email has been hiding in the shadows, growing strong on a diet of Spam, and is now tearing its way through your enterprise as if it were King Kong out for a destructive stroll through Manhattan.
Email is becoming a problem for modern business, and like a monster tearing through the streets; it cannot be ignored any longer. Just as Godzilla leaves a wake of destruction behind him, so does email. Just days after terrorists attacked the US on September 11; a political advisor to the ruling Labour party in the UK sent an email describing current events as a "good opportunity to bury bad news." The paper trail left by the email leaked to Fleet Street and the press were on to it, just as Tony Blair needed positive news. It is the ease of use, something we all desire from technology; that has made email such a wild monster. Rarely is technology allowed to run rampant through the business without a set of policies to tame it, but email slipped the guards.
"Most organisations have 'down sized', so work loads have increased and their admin time has decreased," described Michael Jerkovic, the messaging product manager at global chemicals company Orica. He believes that the boardroom trend to reduce head counts to meet financial targets is making staff work too hard, and in turn they cannot perform good house keeping rules to their email.
As well as a lack of staff time, the fewer heads in the office have to cope with a growing number of emails in the In-Box. Chris Lynch, the managing director of Hummingbird in Australia said he has met with a mining company in West Australia that receives 380,000 emails a week.
Certainly the recent survey by Image & Data Manager revealed the scope of the problem, with 45 per cent of respondents saying their email had grown by 100 per cent, and 26 per cent of respondents saying they receive between 50 and 100 emails a day.
Regional manager of Legato Systems in Australia, Scott Phillips believes that businesses in Australia are not prepared to archive and retain emails.
We all survived prior to email, but it has become such a part of business life and a tool that we depend on that to go backwards would be impossible.
"It has grown into a necessary evil, but you cannot turn it around, it is as necessary as the telephone," Mr Lynch said. But its necessity has been the driver of the biggest problem - volume.
"There are people on the staff who suffer from too much email," Mr Jerkovic said. The speed and simplicity of creating and sending an email has made it the ideal vehicle for over-use in the enterprise. Spam is a problem and one that is easy to complain about, but the amount of internal communications done on email that could be easily done over the phone, face to face or through new technologies is as big a problem.
LEGAL IMPLICATIONS
Email is beginning to be used in legal actions and in some cases; businesses are losing out to their own employees. Leif Godwin is a legal counsel who works with technology integrators Synergy Plus. He has seen cases where an employee has taken his employers to court armed with copies of emails from the enterprise email system, but the company could not produce the same documents.
"A best case scenario is that it looks like incompetence, a worst case is that it looks like a conspiracy," he said of the risks businesses place themselves in.
With email increasingly being trusted for the delivery of business transactions (77 per cent of survey respondents use email for financial transactions), users need to understand the Australian laws that they are bound by.
Section 24 of the Archives Act prohibits a person from destroying, disposing, transferring, damaging or altering a Commonwealth record, yet 42 per cent of respondents to our survey deleted emails themselves on a daily basis. Any document and communication can become a Commonwealth record if your business comes under the jurisdiction of the Archives Act. The Act doesn't mean that organisations must keep their email, but once emails are kept they become a record. If it is a Commonwealth record then nothing can be done that will contravene this Act.
The Corporations Act is relevant to all companies in Australia. Section 286 of this Act demands that an organisation keep written financial records of transactions and statements for audits, which means if transactions have been approved via the email, these too must be retained. A financial record in Australia must be retained for seven years. The act defines financial records as invoices, receipts, orders, promissory notes and working papers, all of which can be and are produced within email clients.
As well as complying with the above Acts, organisations need to consider the contents of emails and whether this may be called upon one day. Emails are considered documents for the purposes of discovery. Discovery is the process where parties that are about to enter litigation request access to documents and for copies for their case. If a document is likely to be critical to an organisation's case, then the integrity of that document, even if it was an email, needs to be assured. If emails have been destroyed and litigation is expected, your organisation could face accusations of being in contempt of court.
Chris Lynch at Hummingbird believes that the cases seen last year where emails was used successfully in court has changed the attitude of many organisations and they are looking to tackle the email monster.
INTERNAL PROBLEMS
Our survey found that 50 per cent of the email that respondents were struggling with was email internally generated. It has become such a problem for global companies like Orica, that Mr Jerkovic is looking at developing their Lotus Notes system to split emails according to whether they are a BCC or CC, "They want to see the ones they should read, not just the ones they are copied in on," he said.
So what created the monster? In the B-movies the monster normally accidentally eats radioactive material, or somehow missed the disastrous affects of a meteorite hitting earth and killing off the dinosaurs. But the email monster seems to have been created by our communications culture.
"I think the problem within organisations is usually 70 per cent cultural, and 30 per cent technological," said Mr Lynch. "If you put the tools in place it's just a Band Aid, but if you put the restrictions in place, I think it will go a whole way towards solving the issue." The awareness of what email is and how it works is relatively unknown. Few users are aware that it creates a trail that can be traced and audited. Also many users are unaware that email clients are not built to be robust data repositories or document archives, it was built to be a messaging system. More advanced systems do integrate with document management systems, and most document and records management vendors will integrate your email system into their application, but having the tools is one thing, using them properly is another. A frying pan doesn't make a chef!
"People are just not aware of the information that they are creating and storing," Mr Godwin said.
The blame cannot be squarely aimed at the users though, organisations have not defined how email is to be used, as Mr Lynch explained: "From a perspective that email is relatively new, culturally it needs to be confirmed as to its role. You don't make long distance calls to the US from the office, but people send all sorts of emails."
Thus the monster developed, suddenly our PC work stations were connected to the world and in the flash of seconds we could email friends in foreign countries, read and pass on thousands of jokes, discuss work in what we considered privacy, and set up friendships and chat rooms with people with similar interests. All the while this was rich food for the monster within. It passed on our contact details, used up bandwidth and made a comfy living space in the enterprise storage systems. The monster robbed companies of valuable productivity and sapped the abilities of resources.
But the email problem extends beyond the walls of large organisations. In a report recently put together by the Norada Corporation, small businesses make up for 54 per cent of all workers today. More than 50 per cent of the workforce is located in remote sites; a problem of particular importance to Australia where many large international companies set up branch offices to serve the Australian and New Zealand markets.
The cultural use of email changes within different human cultures, and as organisations become increasingly global, this will and is presenting a problem. From the Melbourne office, Mr Jerkovic supplies the backend email system to the entire Orica group. He said that workers in the US and Latin America are very large users of email, whilst in the Asia Pacific region workers tend to prefer face to face meetings. These cultural differences affect the email system at Orica, and will likely affect others.
REACHING THE LIMIT
Placing size limits on the In-Boxes of users is a clumsy, but often necessary way of keeping email in check. With limits on storage capacity, it at least forces users to take some time and file away their emails when they reach the limit.
"The current way we handle it is that we give people 40 megabyte limits. I don't believe it's the way to do it, but if you don't people start to get lazy with deleting files," Mr Jerkovic said.
The trouble with limits is that they have to be applied across the board and do not reflect the needs of the individual. Within a corporation you may have knowledge workers that only ever deal with Word documents and small files, whilst two floors up you may have a design team that needs to share digital imagery with a design studio in London. One knowledge worker may never exceed their 40 megabytes limit if they look after their system, whilst the other may find their productivity grossly affected by not being able to access the information sent to him.
In the long run, email storage limits is akin to asking everyone who uses the Internet to connect via 56K modem, which is fine for some Web sites, but terrible for Flash animated sites. The limit would not suit all, especially business users.
Limiting the amount of storage space that each end user has within the email system does not ensure that vital information is retained though. A worker may delete off valuable knowledge or lose records of financial transactions in an effort to keep their In-Box in order. Thus limiting only really guarantees that the monster doesn't grow in size, but it can still terrorise the business with damaging effects.
One major problem of email's growth has been that, on the whole, email systems are not an integrated part of other information management systems. Thus information delivered to email is not dissimilar to that gained on the telephone, it is not directly entered into the information systems. But email carries the danger of producing records that can be used in court, whereas a telephone conversation, unless recorded, does not.
Records archiving laws in Australia demand that electronic records identify the origin and destination of the communication, and the time of dispatch and receipt; details that email has, but which are often lost if they are not archived correctly.
Australian law also demands that if digital records are being used in legal proceedings, that electronic records must be "suitable". By "suitable" the laws demand that the records include keywords, the date of creation, the author, and the history of any amendments made to the document. None of these are outside of the realms of email, it is the act of archiving them properly that will ensure this is done.
"I am amazed at how much email is driving document management (DM) enquiries. They are looking for a drag and drop central repository system," Chris Lynch of Hummingbird said. The desire to control the email monster is certainly helping the document management vendors. The return on investment (ROI) from using a document management system for email management is the winning hand for document management tenders, Hummingbird reports.
Technology and its vendors are often claiming to be the solution, but as Mr Lynch admitted, the problem tends to be cultural. Like all cultural problems, the answer could lay in education. A campaign of education and awareness has reduced drink driving, could a campaign of email awareness save an organisation?
"Just having a system and a policy for document retention is not enough - employees need to be aware of the consequences of actions such as altering emails and destroying documents has," said Mr Godwin.
Mr Jerkovic agrees, "I think training has made a huge difference, but when people are under pressure it goes out of the window."
Twice in our interview Mr Jerkovic alluded to the cultural problem with email now being deeper than the lack of policy and direction towards email. There is no shortage of reports stating that modern workers are putting in too many hours, many are completing over 35 hours a week, not receiving over-time pay and are not taking lunch breaks. Email has sped up the working process, it has helped in the creation of the data overload that many IT managers report, and yet staffing numbers have fallen in most organisations. If a telephone in the office kept ringing and no one dealt with it there would be an outcry and action, or if the office door was blocked by too much unopened post. Will the stockpile of email waiting to be archived spark the same reaction?
The monster is out, but this isn't a giant ape or dinosaur, the email monster is multi-faceted, like terrorism and other modern problems there is not a single answer, the monster can only be defeated by targeting each cause of its strength individually.
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