As a preface, let me state once again: I do NOT support the declaration of
email as a series. Categorically. Emphatically. And anyone who has heard me
speak on email EVER can attest to that - I specifically say that email is
NOT a series and that individual emails have to be declared and managed
according to the content therein - which could be the message text, the
attachment(s), the metadata all by itself in some instances where needed to
provide context about the thread or messages within the thread. 

Now, as usual Larry makes some good points. Training users on when email is
the appropriate mechanism and when not is a great thing to do. But it's
important to note that it will be honored only in the breach - that horse is
out of the barn and it ain't going back in anytime soon. And you can't fire
all 10,000 users who don't follow the email policy because it doesn't make
sense to them. More importantly, it doesn't make sense to all the customers
who, rightly or wrongly, expect and/or demand email access to your
organization. That's not all customers, nor all organizations, but if you
tell a broker/dealer that they cannot execute trades using email, IM, or
other challenging technologies, you won't even finish the statement before
they ignore you. Agree or disagree, it's the way the world is as of April
2007. 

<snip>...I think if most of us looked across how many messages of this type
there are on an daily basis, there wouldn't be the purported 177 messages a
day we're seeing in some articles. I receive around 100 BUSINESS RELATED
e-mails a day, generally, about 10-15 of these are a record.  Many have a 3
or 5 year retention, a few have a longer retention.  But over 80% of them
get jettisoned.</snip>

You'd still receive them - you just wouldn't save them. And I agree here.
That's why I use the slightly older Radicati figure of 85 sent/received and
my gut guesstimate that 5-10% are records. I also recently spoke with an
organization whose business process is to use emails to negotiate and
confirm contracts - their email records are in the range of 60% or so. So as
I noted, your mileage may vary. But you still have to hack through however
many you receive - and do the same for whichever responses you send. 

<snip>
Again, POLICY is what is lacking here.  Just because e-mail has these
"intrinsic qualities" (and I think qualities may be an incorrect assessment)
doesn't mean that they SHOULD be used in a best business practices setting.

Step back a few years, and ask yourself, how many times did you make copies
of a letter you received and send it to multiple parties in your office, or
how many times did you write your response on the bottom of the letter and
send it back, along with whatever attachments you received, to the sender
and others?  And how many times did the other party write their response on
it and send it back again, and again , and again to you and multiple
parties?
</snip>

Nope, there is a policy in place, and it is a different policy than what has
been done in the past. And the reason we don't do what Larry described in
the paper world is not because there's a policy against it, but because it
is impractical to do so in the paper world. Email makes that an easy thing
to do, so we do it. And it is becoming a best practice in certain
circumstances because it's both much faster and easier than the previous
paper-based approach and it's a way to capture and memorialize information
that might have previously been exchanged by telephone. 

<snip>
This is an apples and oranges argument to the proposal that e-mail, as "an
entity", isn't a record that gets scheduled.  Core samples aren't always
records, depends on what they represent or support, or the purpose they
serve. Each "part" of a multi-part form may be a record, and each may serve
a different purpose, and similarly, each may have a different retention
period, but they aren't assigned a retention period based on them being a
"multi-part form". 
</snip>
I have never made the assertion that "email" should show up on a RRS.
Indeed, I'm pretty vocally to the contrary. My position is that given a
corpus of 1 day's worth of work, it is easier to determine, declare,
classify, and manage paper-based records than electronic types, in part
because of the lower volume involved and in part because a physical record
*is* the record - what you see is what you get. 

So to use the example of a CAD file, you are exactly correct: the CAD file
is a record, including all of the data in the CAD file. The layers are most
certainly a part of the record; the views I'm more ambivalent about, but I
would never recommend to a client that they simply output a PDF or paper
version of the CAD file and call it good. And it's not declared as a record
because it's a CAD file, it's because it's the best version of the building
design which itself has a retention of the life of the building. 

<snip>
If your organization has realized WHY you have so many e-mail messages to
categorize and schedule and is on the way to limiting the volume they need
to deal with, an even greater set of congratulations is in order.</snip>

I think this is part of our fundamental disagreement: I believe that this
argument is easy to make in the abstract but practically impossible to make
in the real world. You noted that you get 100 business-related emails a day.
Not sure how many you send, but even comparing just that 100 that you have
to touch in some form with the number of paper documents you have to touch
in some form, make some type of decision about, can you really say that you
could cut your emails down just to the 10-15 you argue might be records? How
would you do that? How would you get your coworkers to do that? How would
you get the LIST to do that, short of leaving the list? 

<snip>Funny, but this "logic" (argument?) doesn't seem to make a bit of
sense to me.</snip>

A record is a record, irrespective of media form or format to a  Records
Management Practitioner or Professional, that's the way I learned it and
have practiced it all the years I've been in RIM. Anyone else??   What needs
to be done with electronically generated records IS THE SAME, you just use
different methods to achieve the same thing.</snip>

As I am wont to do, I took the assertions you and Steve made WRT email
management solutions and replaced the pertinent verbiage with something that
demonstrates the fallacy of the assertion. I agree that that argument
doesn't make sense; don't believe that that is the argument I am making. 

I agree completely with your final assertion and in fact would suggest that
we are at last violently agreeing. My point throughout is that a record is a
record is a record according to policies and procedures but that
fundamentally different methods are required to deal with electronic records
generally and email records specifically because of the differences I
outlined earlier. 

Cheers, 

Jesse Wilkins
[log in to unmask]

List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance