Quocirca's Straight Talking: Coping with email overload

Email is the most widely used business communications tool and also plays a key role when complying with the ever-increasing numbers of corporate regulations. So how can you make sure it's managed properly? Quocirca's Bob Tarzey explains.

Following all the excitement caused by the end of the millennium, the telecoms and internet boom and, in Europe at least, the introduction of the euro, a couple of years back the IT industry fell flat on its face as revenues tumbled and share prices plummeted. As IT vendors picked themselves up they started looking for new ways to persuade enterprises to part with their money but it has not been easy - once bitten, twice shy.

One area where many vendors have convinced themselves they will find traction is in helping their customers to comply with the recent raft of regulations introduced by governments at the industry, national and regional levels. Their message in its crudest form is - comply or die. Ironically the introduction of many of these regulations has been fuelled by the misbehaviour of the directors of enterprises during the boom period.

The vendors that take this narrow approach are in danger of looking naïve when they turn up to give their sales pitch. It is not that business and IT managers are unconcerned about the regulations, just that they are only part of a long list of things they have to worry about. That list includes brand name protection, customer confidence, employee productivity and competitiveness. Consideration of all these issues will be reflected in the way they govern their businesses and this will influence their IT purchases.

One particular area where businesses have cause for concern when it comes to corporate governance is email. Email is by far the most widely used business communications tool. On average email now constitutes 60 per cent of both internal and external communications in enterprises. Some organisations now estimate that email forms half of all the data they store and nearly all say it has been increasing and they expect it to continue to do so.

Managers are worried about this because email is also increasingly important in the initiation and resolution of disputes with customers, suppliers and employees - but they should be able to put these worries to one side. Used well, email can be an efficient communications tool and an important part of the processes that run a business.

Email is the only truly threaded means of communication whereby the record of what was said, by whom, to who and who else knew about it is maintained. This is a lawyer's dream. Email has to pass through the corporate email server, so it is the business that can choose to selectively retain email, regardless of what the users choose to do with it on their desktop.

In the past IT departments have usually limited the amount of email storage allocated to employees quite severely. With the plummeting cost of storage media, along with its increasing density and improved efficiency of use, there is no need to be so stringent. Employees can be encouraged to use their email as a primary storage area. For the business this means a central store of their employees' communications is maintained along with the documents they pass between each other and send to or receive from customers and suppliers.

Of course this cannot go completely unchecked. There is no point in storing irrelevant or unwanted email and it can only help with good business governance if when it comes to the crunch, relevant material can be easily located and retrieved. Good email management is required.

There are two basic steps required to achieve this. First is to cut out irrelevant email. Good email filtering software has been available for many years and can be used to keep out the junk and control what is generated by employees, making sure they stay focussed on business-oriented communications. This is a step in the right direction and many organisations are already doing this - although effectiveness can always be improved. But filtering software is not designed to make the subtle decisions about what email should be kept in order to protect the business against future threats - and yet human intervention is impractical due to the high volumes of messages.

The only way to be sure is to store all email that is not stopped by filters; however, you do not need to store it forever. Effective email archiving tools allow rules to be put in place reflect the requirements of the regulators, the wishes of the business and plain common sense. For example, by default all email shall be kept for a given period of time but for employees of certain departments like legal and finance it can be kept for longer. Also emails with words like 'contract' or 'proposal' in the title can be kept for longer, whist those that contain large attachments can be stored for less time.

Good archiving means rules can be put in place and adjusted through time to reflect the way the business is governed in response to a wide range of factors including those imposed by regulators.

The danger email poses to businesses should not be underestimated. Whilst a weighty report is likely to have undergone intensive internal review before distribution, an email might get the once-over from a spell checker. The number of times email is playing a role in resolving business and legal disputes is ever-increasing and you can be sure that if you cannot find relevant copies of the emails sent and received by your employees, someone else will. Best to be prepared than caught unawares.

You can find Quocirca's free report on email and corporate governance on our website.