Larry & Mary,

I apologize for my misinterpretation.  It was never my intent to imply
that RM people could ever be eliminated from the equation in place of
technology.  Policy or effective use of technology is not possible
without RM people leading the charge.  Technology will never be a silver
bullet; it should never be more than just a tool.  I agree with the
three-pronged approach 100% and I appreciate your response.

-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Larry Medina
Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 5:52 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: email retention

On 10/27/05, Peterson, Elvin Jr. <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Does everyone else have enough people to address the volume of
> information they currently have and its expected growth without the
use
> of technology when it comes to email?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> I believe the best products and tools on the market are called people.
> Unfortunately, they want to find something else to do their work.
>
> Mary Hilliard, CRM



Elvin-

I think you may have misinterpreted the intent of Mary's message.
Technology
can be a wonderful thing, when applied properly to the proper
situations. At
this point, there doesn't seem to really be a "silver bullet of
technology"
that meets the needs for e-mail management for everyone or every
industry
segment.

When this thread started out, there was request for an assignment of a
time
frame for the retention of e-mail and a question asking if e-mail was a
record. Obviously, neither of these came from someone who has much
experience in the RIM field. The answer to the first question is
something
that requires an evaluation of the content of the e-mail message/s and
an
application of the organization's retention schedule, IF the e-mail is
decided to be a record. The answer to the second depends on applying the
rules of your organizations RIM Policy to determine the "recordness" of
the
e-mail.

Your subsequent questions were a little more "on the head" as to the
types
of questions that allow you to start getting a grasp on the requirements
for
managing e-mail, if you are relying on technology to do that... but as
both
individuals who responded to you stated (in differing ways) it requires
some
SERIOUS human intervention. The "tool aspects" of any application being
marketed have some limitations, and all of them need to be fine tuned to
meet an organizations specific needs. But in reality, what is required
is a
STRONG, enforceable policy on the use of e-mail and what does and
doesn't
get done by e-mail.

Auto-classification isn't automatic; and it doesn't classify. It is able
to
*learn to classify* based on taxonomy setup by whoever is
administering/managing the system, but it takes time to build the rules
to
successfully classify the information and it needs to be tweaked until
you
reach a level of satisfaction with the results... and that might be 75%,
85%, 90% or whatever... but at that point you STILL NEED to manually
classify the remainder. And this is where the HUMANS figure into the
equation.

I don't think ANY organization has the workforce required to do it all
manually, but I also don't think anyone is able to accept the lack of
accuracy of relying on it being done in an automatic manner either. To
achieve a successful management of e-mail requires a three-pronged
approach;
policy, personnel and technology.

Larry
--
Larry Medina
Danville, CA
RIM Professional since 1972

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