I agree with Steve here and would additionally note that given the current
state of automatic classification tools vs. the overwhelming volume of email
most organizations receive, many organizations are choosing to do what they
can vs. trying to apply traditional records best practices that don't scale.
If the average employee receives 110 emails/day (and I think that's the last
stat I saw from Radicati), that's 2200/month or 26,400/year per employee. A
recent client of mine has 23,000 employees. That's 607 MILLION emails per
year to have to manage. Now some of you will say "But Jesse, not all of
those are records and have to be managed!" You're half right: not all of
them are records. But someone still has to make the determination as to
record or not and then do something with the record messages...and if that's
only 5% of all of them that's still 30.4 million email records to be dealt
with, declared as records, classified, indexed, etc. At the same time, most
organizations' classification structures are all but opaque to users who
don't have an MLIS or other appropriate info architecture background - and
that's almost all of them. So a) the users cannot do it, at least not
easily, and b) there aren't enough records managers on the planet to do even
just the email.
A better approach might just be to combine email archiving with the
full-text indexing capabilities of many of the email messaging
applications/gateways/appliances available. I'm not saying that this is the
desired end state necessarily, but faced with the alternatives of doing
nothing, doing a little tiny bit as exception, or archiving and full-text
indexing, I know which one I'd recommend.
Jesse Wilkins
CDIA+, edp, LIT, ICP, ermm, ecmm
J Wilkins & Associates
[log in to unmask]
blog: http://informata.blogspot.com
(303) 574-1455 office
(303) 484-4142 fax
-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Steve Petersen
Sent: Friday, March 30, 2007 7:41 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Email archiving systems and document management systems
Glen,
While agreeing in general that archiving all mail off to an archive isn't
good RIM there may be instances where the archiving of mail considered a
record could be adequate and acceptable from a risk standpoint for a
company. This would depend on the particular companies situation
(non-regulated) and risk management strategy. To me having a process and
following it consistently is better than no process at all
The archiving solution could also be a step in moving toward good RIM and
at the same time lower both liability and cost to a company. While full
management of messages in an ERM is best practice an interim step of
bucketing messages into record series categories could be beneficial in
movement toward that best practice. It's been a sort double edged sword
at my employer as its worked well from an IT /legal side ,not quite as
well from the RIM side but its better than it was and the next step will
involve less change management and be almost transparent to the end -user.
Again its a matter of putting a good plan together and gaining the
management /end-user approval needed to keep moving the process toward a
best practice endstate.
Small steps- small wins can move a RIM program toward the best practice
endstate while not causing major chaos in the enterprise.
My 2 cents
Steve Petersen CRM
Records Manager
Rockwell Collins Inc
319.295.5244
"Bringing Order Out of Chaos"
List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance
List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance
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