Dear all,

Technology does not solve the email problem; it is a business process and
change management challenge that technology can facilitate but not change
alone.  Organizations use (or misuse) email and do a generally poor job of
training the workforce on best practices for collaboration, document
management, and records archiving.  

The problem will not be solved until organizations make a concerted effort
to train new hires/employees on email usage, establish central repositories
for content storage, impose bona fide lifecycles to that content based on
file plans and retention schedules, and establish permissions-based access
to electronically stored information.  Until then, email will continue to be
grossly over-retained and will continue to create the inefficiencies and
liabilities we read about every day.  

As Jesse correctly points out, this discussion thread is a perfect example
of the problem. When responding to a subject matter or project, unstructured
email communications like these should be collected and preserved in a
structured database.  Email links for notification are all we need.  Email
notifications would be readily disposable as long as we know where to find
the content of this discussion in a central and structured database. 

This is a highly complex area that cannot be solved with technology alone.

Respectfully yours,


Rick Wolf


443 Northfield Avenue, Suite 301
West Orange, NJ 07052
(973) 324-0050
(973) 324-0052 (fax)
(201) 602-9486
www.lexakos.com



-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Jesse Wilkins
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2007 2:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: E-mail Business Rules

Email is NOT as simple as Steve and Larry describe - otherwise more
organizations would already have applied 60+ years of RM best practices to
the problem and have solved it, thereby rendering those vendors' unnecessary
solutions, well, unnecessary. 

I do not claim that "the sky is falling". I do claim that because of the
intrinsic qualities of email including but not limited to ease of
forwarding, Ccing, BCCing, multiple attachments of any type which themselves
might be records, the tendency to have multiple messages as part of a single
message (as Steve just demonstrated) which are editable prior to
replying/forwarding, the tendency to keep the same subject line for that
thread ten messages after the thrust of the thread has changed completely,
the fact that emails are sent to and received from inside and outside the
organization, often as part of the same thread and at different times in the
conversation to different individuals and groups, the different electronic
formats available for email messages and the applications used to create and
store them (3 different things here), and most importantly the sheer volumes
involved, that email cannot be addressed in the exact same fashion as paper
records or even many other types of electronic records, which otherwise
might be addressable in the fashion Steve describes (although I reserve
judgment on that as well in many instances). 

I think this is akin to arguing that microfilm is just another record media
and should not be treated any differently. This is also not true - from the
physical storage to the indexing mechanisms used to retrieve a requested
frame to how that information can be shared with others, we do treat
microfilm slightly differently. And multipart forms. And physical records
like core samples. And notarized documents. And the list goes on and on and
on. Or that CAD files are just another file format and can be treated as
their paper counterparts, while ignoring the unique things having the
original electronic file provides (views and layers as a starting point). 

If your organization has already solved the email challenge, and you're
declaring as high a percentage of those email messages that rise to the
level of records and as accurately as you do paper, congratulations. Of
course, you probably don't need an ERMS either - because since electronic
records are the same as paper, just a different media, it's unnecessary;
only vendors who assert that "the sky is falling" would design solutions to
address electronic records; and only users who have been hornswoggled would
ever buy those solutions. 

Cheers, 

Jesse Wilkins
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