A theme that will recur throughout these discussions is that a massive volume of electronically stored information creates increasingly complex and daunting challenges for organizations around the world. What I’ve noticed in speaking with so many companies is that when most begin to evaluate their situation, they realize they’ve wound up pointedly on the horns of an e-discovery dilemma. (Some of course are fully impaled...)
On one hand, information must be secured and retained, or else face fines and sanctions (and bad publicity) associated with the seemingly willful destruction of electronic evidence. On the other hand by simply saving everything ever created in the organization, companies substantially drive up the cost and risk they’ll incur later. The corporate cost associated with litigation and the e-discovery process directly correlates to the volume of content retained.
This is where I start to see customer needs converge – organizations wonder: "What can we do to start purging unimportant information, in a timely but responsible manner?" At Open Text this was one of the concepts we considered when scoping out the most recent release of Open Text Email Management for Microsoft Exchange. There’s really two equally important aspects to it. One, disposing of this so-called "transitory information" must be done in a standardized and consistent fashion—in other words, in both good faith and in the context of a systemized approach to records management. But two, it also needs to take into consideration the business user—in other words, the person who might be using this information to get his or her daily job done. Users should always have a mechanism to identify information that is relevant to the company or useful in one’s day-to-day work—and most importantly, they can benefit themselves from an inbox that has some sense and structure to its contents, and one that periodically is alleviated of unimportant information automatically—the clutter that gets in our way when we’re trying to find that one critical email in a hoard of hundreds or even thousands.
They are not easy questions to answer: how much email should we keep? How long should we keep it? It’s a balancing act of risk tolerance. But it is the place I see most organizations starting from these days. They are understanding that indiscriminately capturing everything and saving it “forever” is an unsustainable practice.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Email being what it is, one dreams of revenge...
Email being what it is, one dreams of revenge. As a communication tool no one can deny its business value – but the rampant growth of email in corporations has created insurmountable problems and unsustainable practices. In the past eighteen months I’ve spent many weeks visiting with organizations and hearing first-hand the challenges and issues they are facing due to poor email management practices—and while the issues are multi-fold and complex, the one reality I see that is as recurring as it is disheartening, is that massive corporate costs and risks directly correlate to the volume of information retained. In other words, as companies we are incurring enormous, often litigation-related costs, that are driven up by the amount of email we seem to be haphazardly saving.
Every company I speak with understands that it’s time for a change – but they also understand that most business users spend the majority of their working day in their email application, and trying to enforce some corporate control against that environment is bound to incur user apprehension, if not full-scale revolt. At Open Text, we uphold an innovative and forward-looking philosophy on email management – it’s one that characterized as much by facilitating corporate goals of retaining and destroying email responsibly, as it is by providing an accommodating user experience. Our product strategy is designed to ensure users not only adopt a policy and practice because they are good corporate citizens – but more importantly, because they actually derive personal value by participating in the first place.
Over the next several weeks, leading up to both the ARMA Conference in mid October and Open Text Content World in the latter half of the month, I’ll be sharing some insights here about the conversations I’ve had with companies around the world. Along the way we’ll share some of the rationale that contributed to the design strategy for our forthcoming Open Text Email Management 10, an innovative product conceived with one fundamental goal: help companies end the mismanagement of email.
Every company I speak with understands that it’s time for a change – but they also understand that most business users spend the majority of their working day in their email application, and trying to enforce some corporate control against that environment is bound to incur user apprehension, if not full-scale revolt. At Open Text, we uphold an innovative and forward-looking philosophy on email management – it’s one that characterized as much by facilitating corporate goals of retaining and destroying email responsibly, as it is by providing an accommodating user experience. Our product strategy is designed to ensure users not only adopt a policy and practice because they are good corporate citizens – but more importantly, because they actually derive personal value by participating in the first place.
Over the next several weeks, leading up to both the ARMA Conference in mid October and Open Text Content World in the latter half of the month, I’ll be sharing some insights here about the conversations I’ve had with companies around the world. Along the way we’ll share some of the rationale that contributed to the design strategy for our forthcoming Open Text Email Management 10, an innovative product conceived with one fundamental goal: help companies end the mismanagement of email.
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