Amanda writes, "People aren't necessarily the best placed to make R&D decisions about their email, but like anything else, there's ignorance which can be overcome."

That may work better in some organizations than in others.  It's awfully hard to get past the very human inclination to purge emails that reflect badly on you and keep the ones that make you look good.  Let me propose a hypothetical that most of us could relate to, then conclude by taking it up a notch.

I'll keep all of this within the government context but it could just as well apply in the private sector.  Let's say you're a professional working at a senior but not top level, say a GS-14 or a GS-15.  Your boss is a senior executive.  As an SESer, s/he manages a wide range of critically important policies and mostly relies on direct reports to run their own shops and get it right.

You work on a project with a younger, more junior colleague.  The two of you don't get along particularly well.  S/he makes some suggestions that you reject out of hand.   Many of the exchanges  -- the suggestions and your rejections - are in email.  Right before the project is completed, the junior colleague leaves and takes a new job elsewhere.

The project does not work out and your SES level boss, who is very analytical and into problem solving and lessons learned, wants to review all materials related to the project file.  Keep in mind, these are Federal records, and their disposition is governed by a comprehensive records schedule.  Your agency has a document management system but no electronic records management software.

In the old days, most of the project materials would have been typed by a secretary who would have filed everything.  She would have no vested interest in the outcome and would include everything, including "memoranda for the record," notes exchanged between you and your junior colleague, etc.  I'm talking about the days before email.  If the boss would have wanted to review your file, he would have asked the secretary to retrieve it, probably from a file cabinet near her desk or from a central file elsewhere.  She would have a good memory of what she filed and would notice if anything was removed.

Nowadays, the materials are electronic and were created by people who had strong vested interests in the outcome-you and your junior colleague.

Lets say a neutral, third party has noted to your boss that a different approach-similar to the one your subordinate suggested-would have achieved better results.  Since the project was done in a quick turnaround, say in less than 90 days, your email system has not yet autodeleted email from the time period when your subordinate suggested the other approach.

The failure of the project is an aberration.  You, as a subject matter expert, have a very solid track record within the agency.  You get along very well with your senior executive boss.  Discussing what went wrong might be somewhat personally embarrassing but is something you know you could recover from.  Depending on the type of person you are, you could handle this several ways.  I'll describe two approaches.

(1)  You are confident but not arrogant, and courageous enough to face up to the facts when you do something wrong.  You give your boss access to all materials, including electronic or hard copy email messages.  You and your boss discuss what went wrong and why and agree that the younger colleague had insights you had not considered sufficiently.  Your boss does not lose trust in you-your past track record is so solid you can absorb this-but it is a difficult experience for you to go through.  But, you keep in mind the goal of organizational integrity, what's best for the group as a whole, not just you as an individual.

(2)  You're arrogant and strongly vested in protecting an image of yourself as the Alpha, someone who not only always prevails, but has impeccable professional judgment and never is wrong.  This matters more to you than the organization's ability to learn lessons.  You review the electronic file that your junior colleague had created.  Despite the fact that they are Federal records, you delete the electronic copies of the email exchanges that your junior colleage had saved in the folder in the document management system.  You also make sure you have purged your own email account of the emails that show you rejecting the alternative approach.  You present your boss for his review a folder (hard copy or electronic) that simply shows some bland documents showing project progress reviews.  There's no way to tell how the chosen approach evolved and what was considered and rejected.  Since this is not a legal inquiry, you know no one will ask for backup tapes or even suspect that records have been deleted or altered.

Which approach captures the true history of the project as opposed to a sanitized, self serving version?  Which is more likely to enable the people in your office to learn some lessons?  Yeah, yeah, I know some of you might say, "hey, why did you create records by putting your rebuffs of your colleague in email in the first place?  I save that kind of stuff for oral communications, best not to leave a paper trail that might come back to haunt me!"  That approach could be called pre-emptive sanitization.

In considering everything that can go wrong with email, let's take it up a notch.   Keep in mind that before coming to GAO to work as its historian, I worked at the National Archives for 14 years, screening the Nixon tapes for public access.  My specialty was the "abuse of governmental power" materials.  Naturally, I follow stories about Presidential records closely.

Consider this extract from an article from Government  Computer News, June 4, 2001:

"Poor contractor oversight by the office staffs of President Clinton and Vice President Gore led to problems with archiving e-mail and left officials scrambling to recover years' worth of electronic documents.

The problems surfaced after congressional committees investigating potential campaign finance irregularities subpoenaed White House e-mail records."
http://www.gcn.com/vol20_no13/news/4378-1.html

That article refers to a GAO report, "Electronic Records: Clinton Administration's Management of Executive Office of the President E-Mail System,
 GAO-01-446  April 30, 2001, available at
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d01446.pdf.

GAO has noted the human factor in its earlier work on removal of records by high level officials in the executive branch.  GAO noted in 1991 in a report on "Federal Records: Document Removal by Agency Heads Needs Independent Oversight" that subordinates might not be able to challenge the removal of records by departing high level officialos.  (http://archive.gao.gov/t2pbat7/144859.pdf)

Or go back further to the PROFS case that triggered lawsuits affecting White House email during the Reagan administration.  Here's an extract from the Independent Counsel's report (http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/).

"In October and November 1986, North altered, destroyed, and removed documents and official records relating to the resupply operation. On November 23, 1986, he lied to the attorney general to conceal Secord's operation and his own responsibility in directing the secret resupply activities and the control of the funds used to finance them. Between November 22 and 29, 1986, Poindexter unsuccessfully tried to delete from the White House computer system all of his communications with North."
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/part_iii.htm

As records managers, you're lucky if you work in organizations where such scenarios are unlikely to occur and you can focus primarily on the RIM and IT aspects of managing email.   The biggest challenges lie in areas where what emails contain can have national import.

Maarja

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