Email Archiving, AWB and ENRON

Month Date, 2006: With the Australian Wheat Board and by extension the Australian Federal Government under scrutiny - and with the 'fair shake' trial of ENRON underway, IDM sought industry comment on the role of ICT.

Recent high-profile enquiries into corporate governance have brought to light exactly why document and records management must be key to all business practices. Of course, this should always have been the case, however, the advent of email as the primary tool for communication - complete with its aura of 'techno-mystery' - is providing harder grounds on which to sow seeds of doubt as to the veracity of documentation.

David Thompson, AXS-One's vice president, Asia Pacific spoke to IDM and laid out his thoughts on the importance of good records and document manager:

Over the past 12 months we have seen a considerable increase in enquiries and installations for email and operational archiving and records management.

Interestingly, the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and other compliance regulations have not been the instigators of many installations here, although companies do acknowledge the by-product of being compliant will be of benefit in the future.

By far the biggest incentive for implementing email archiving is for operational reasons. Many organisations just don't have a system to centrally archive their unstructured data such as emails and attachments and instant messages.

Fear is another reason: of the enormous costs involved in litigation and court discovery orders - or even the threat of a discover order. Fear too of the damage that can be done to an organisation's reputation, such as AWB Limited, where its board admits its reputation has been "significantly damaged" through the current enquiry into the UN's Oil-for-Food Program.

There are other motivators for companies to implement an email retention and archiving solution that will see the rapid uptake of this technology. One of these is proactive monitoring, where emails can be centrally supervised and suspicious or inappropriate content is identified. This is particularly useful in helping to stop insider trading, sexual harassment and other workplace issues before the blow up to become a legal issue.

While records retention is the first thought for most senior managers, securing the destruction of records is equally as important. There are risks associated with retaining records for longer than is legally required or retaining records in conflict with the privacy laws.

With around 80 per cent of company communication now handled via email and instant messages, "management" is one word that can help companies reduce the risks associated with emails and their attachments. A central repository needs to protect records with WORM technology (Write Once Read Many) so that documents can be accessed but not altered.

I estimate that in three to five years, every major organisation worldwide will implement a compliance management solution, which will provide enormous benefits to HR, IT, finance and legal departments through cost savings and better administrative and operational procedures.

Commenting on the ENRON trial, Mark Donkersley, managing director of AXS-One in the UK, commented:

"Since the Enron debacle first emerged, both governments in the US and the UK focused their attentions on bringing to an end the culture of chief executives conducting business activities unchallenged and without governance. However, the attention of this trial will likely instigate a corporate compliance check-up for businesses.

"The IT department's ability to deliver true transparency of all accounting information has been under the spotlight for some time. However, governance demands and the IT department's perception of what is achievable do not always match up. Research that we recently commissioned revealed that 76 percent of European IT directors' questioned believed it was "inevitable" that their company will lose a proportion of digital files. This figure raises the question as to whether IT managers have really got to grips with what the regulators have been demanding for some time."

"Maintaining a tight grip over all corporate information isn't as difficult as some might think. The technology exists to archive and search through all corporate records in seconds, irrespective of the size of the corporate file. It can also allay corporate uncertainties by providing assurances that the data returned is complete and accurate. Meaning, it is possible for companies to cross-reference and check any queried financial figures in seconds. Leaving future plausible deniability' claims out in the cold."

AXS-One has been in the application software business for more than 25 years and operating in the archival business in Australia since 1987.

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