Thank you for the thoughtful response, Bernadette.  I believe we may be
closer to concurrence on the subject than it might appear, so please accept
this further clarification of my first post.

For example, I agree with the premise that it is difficult and highly
complex to alter human behavior, but that does not mean organizations should
not educate custodians on the proper use of existing systems and steer users
in a direction that could result in an overall reduction of enterprise email
volume.  Ultimately, there is no control over email accounts on internet
accounts, but policy should at least inform employees that it is
inappropriate to conduct business over email systems outside the
organizational firewall.  As a parent of a 13-year-old email user, I
appreciate your point.

In the business world, many organizations still hire new employees and give
them email accounts without training or explanation as to proper use.
Studies show that virtually all organizations (at least their compliance and
legal officers) would agree with the premise that more training is desirable
in respect of email usage.  This is not about attaining perfection.  That
would be unrealistic.  My point is merely that email is used too broadly and
there are complementary technologies, such as collaboration and structured
project management tools.  Even instant messaging (without archiving) in
certain non-regulated industries, is an improvement over using email for
every conceivable form of communication.  

Collaborative systems function like email but have the significant benefit
of containing all the dialogue on a subject in one bucket.  This is
particularly desirable, if not necessary, with respect to segregating
attorney-client communications or work product in the context of so-called
e-discovery in the United States (the de facto litigation center of the
world).  On a project-by-project basis, lifecycle rules can be manageably
applied to content in structured databases, whereas it is unwieldy to apply
hold management or disposition rules to billions of unstructured email
content.

I appreciate the fact that there is no silver bullet or easy answers to this
debate, but that is what makes the phenomenon of email and implications such
an important its risk management issue for organizations (private, public
and governmental).

Best regards,

Rick

-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Bean, Bernadette (HEALTH)
Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2007 7:21 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: E-mail Business Rules

This is, as it always is, a fascinating debate.  Of course being an RM
professional I agree that, in theory at least, email should be managed
according to its content just like everything else we attempt to manage.
However, I have a sneaking suspicion that we've lost this battle and
we're going to need a new theory fairly soon.  

Rick Wolf in an earlier message in this thread made this statement 

"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..."

I disagree with that statement.  I think that the problem will not be
solved until the humans that run organisations stop believing they can
restrict and re-train human behaviour.  Much as I would wish it to be
otherwise the fact is that innate human behaviour will win out every
time over training or regulation. As those who read they 21 Technology
flops article in Computerworld will know: many good ideas don't work
simply because people don't take to them and no amount of coercion,
training, or regulating can change that.

I cannot imagine a world in which today's 13-year old is going to be
"trained" to use email in work-appropriate ways so that everything is
neatly stored in central repositories with easily identifiable
life-cycles.  Today's 13-year old has at least a couple of email
accounts, half a dozen instant message accounts and countless social
networking accounts ALL of which they use to communicate. They've grown
up with web 2.0: they're not going to stop doing all this once they hit
the workplace.  

We, or our successors, are going to have to tackle a much bigger problem
than managing email which has been created or received in a
work-supplied email system.  The American Republican Party is already
ahead of its time (?) by not using the White House email system for a
whole load of what some might consider to be work-related
communications; this kind of thing will only grow in the not too distant
future.  

We're going to have to start playing a different song than the old
familiar "the medium doesn't matter: content is king" standby because
that simply won't hold up when our corporate communications are
routinely taking place via web based email accounts (gmail etc) and
where work-related information is being added to (and commented on at) a
plethora of blogs and MySpace pages, and where our corporate photos are
stored on Flickr accounts and our training materials are podcasts stored
only at a third party provider like libsyn.  

Whether we want it to or not we're fast reaching the point where the
medium does matter.

Cheers, Bernadette
 
Bernadette Bean
Records Management Strategist
Finance and Administration Division
Department of Health (South Australian Government)
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