Shrinking Your Outlook and Throwing out the Network Drives.
Shrinking Your Outlook and Throwing out the Network Drives.
July 24th, 2007: Sounds crazy doesn’t it? The very title dredges up fear of your precious email folders being lost to the depths of oblivion and treasured network drives going the way of permanent inaccessibility
Unfortunately for many of us, both of these are cruxes we rely on as part of potentially very messy knowledge management. Marie Walker, Manager of Corporate information at the Port of Brisbane has outlined how the Port has done what many of us would fear to do as part of a change management solution.
The reduction in email folder size isn’t as terrible and email deletion prone as it sounds. Put simply, it involves capping the folder size employees and stakeholders are using for storing emails in set locations, often as part of the business’ enterprise document and records management system (eDRMS). This means information can be controlled and monitored instead of rotting in a plethora of inboxes. What sounds like a potential genocide of inbox contents can actually turn email management into a corporate asset.
Speaking at the KM Australia conference in Sydney this week, Walker outlined how the abandonment of network drives was also an integral part of the successful Objective solution strategy used by the Port of Brisbane. Network drives are often prone to a lazy haphazard network of files stored all over the place, and due to the nature of a multi shared drive there is little to no accountability of who is and is not storing their files properly. "The big difference we've noticed is that we now have a consistent approach to our first two tiers of storing information." Walker said.
It should be pointed out however, there are quite a few successful implementations of network drive storage systems, and indeed many of these are a major asset to the business, yet in a lot of cases they have deteriorated and become a hindrance to the business function.
The Port of Brisbane implemented this by making files on their network drive read only for a number of months and new files had to be stored in eDRMS controlled areas, with far greater accountability and record management. "It was a bold move, we abandoned all our drives." Walker said.
Whilst these solutions are not for everyone, with the increased legal risk of having mountains of often unknown data in employee inboxes and disorganized network drives, these methods of controlling the flow of information may become more and more commonplace as part of change management solutions.