William, 

I don't think so - or at least I didn't intend it to be. I simply used your
phrasing to make my point, as I often do when folks make what I consider to
be inflammatory assertions on the list. If I misread or misunderstood your
phrasing, I apologize. 

I certainly agree with your premise that doing nothing is not acceptable. I
disagree with the premise that the preferred approach involves artificial
limits that encourage users to work around them to the detriment of the
policies. 

In the absence (so far) of a truly effective automatic classification and
categorization tool that is 100% accurate or close enough as to at least be
manageable, I think the optimal approach right now is email archival, to
offload all the messages from the Exchange/Notes/Groupwise application,
followed by or coincident to rule- and user-based classification. To
paraphrase, it's an ugly, nasty, vicious, labor-intensive solution that's
about the worst possible approach - except for all the other approaches out
there (do nothing, assume users can/will do it given the volumes we're
discussing, mailbox size/age restrictions). 

I would note that Google offers its users 2.89 GB per user (and growing) -
and while Google isn't in the RM business, neither does it suffer from a
deficit of pretty smart folks, at least some of whom enjoy business, legal,
library science, and related expertise. They are pushing Google Apps
Premium, including 10 GB per user, to Fortune 500 corporations and
universities and getting no small amount of traction there. They list among
their customers Proctor & Gamble, GE, L'Oreal, and SF Bay Pediatrics. Yahoo
has gone even further and promises unlimited storage - as in over 10 GB. 

Both Google and Yahoo effectively abstract away the DBMS perspective. The
full-text search capabilities, plus search for attachments, plus metadata,
plus user-based tagging and contextual retrieval, addresses that at least as
well as anything else currently available. Economics? Google Apps is
$50/user/year with no hardware, software, and minimal IT
provisioning/support required. That leaves the records perspective and the
related discovery and production perspective. I don't know how Google and
Yahoo address the latter, but if GE and P&G are using it, there must be
something there. So with regards to the records, given that storage isn't an
issue, litigation is *apparently* being addressed, search and retrieval is
being addressed according to Google, Yahoo, and their respective customers,
the only thing that leaves is disposition at the end of the lifecycle -
ostensibly to address storage, search/retrieval, discovery, and management
limitations. 

There is a risk of keeping emails longer than strictly required, of course -
but while I hate to indulge the bromide, there it is: "If you're not doing
anything wrong (and you have the ENTIRE THREAD OF THE MESSAGE to back that
up), why should you care?" In other words, if you can delete an email
according to your RRS after 2 years, because that's the reg reqt or the
statute of limitations relating to it, but you don't, where's the risk? It's
not actionable after that, right? And as I noted above, the
storage/efficiency arguments don't really come into play. 

I'm prepared to entertain arguments as to what I'm missing here - obviously
there are cultural issues around outsourcing email which I choose NOT to
tackle at the moment. But from any other perspective, this is truly an
honest request: why wouldn't the Google Gmail approach work? This is a
serious question - as your CIOs and IT staff are increasingly going to ask,
or be asked, that question. Again, leave the organizational culture aspects
out of it and focus on the other records-related aspects. 

For the record, I am NOT saying that that is the approach I would or do
recommend to clients - because it isn't. And it should go without saying
that these are my opinions and not those of my employer. But I'm having an
existential moment here trying to understand all the flaws inherent to the
Google/Yahoo model and I know that if I'm missing something, y'all will help
me to find it. 

So...?

Jesse Wilkins
CDIA+, edp, LIT, ICP, ermm, ecmm
[log in to unmask] 
blog: http://informata.blogspot.com
(303) 574-1455 direct
(303) 484-4142 fax

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