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Industry Analysts
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Private Sector
Considering the complex nature of this project and the number and diversity of sources available in the private sector, an effective research strategy was important. We chose to seek out businesses and corporations that use e-mail in their daily course of operations. First, in order to elicit responses from a wide range of businesses in the private sector, we posted a preliminary survey to three listservs (Records Management, Archives, and Special Libraries/Division of Information Technology Engineers). Our results showed both that many businesses are struggling to provide comprehensive e-mail management programs. We then monitored the message traffic on the listservs for the duration of the project, contacting those who seemed knowledgeable about e-mail practices directly. Finally, as a complement to the survey, we contacted professionals in both local and national businesses by telephone and e-mail who may not have received the survey. We targeted corporations considered leaders in their respective industries and who might have invested in sound e-mail retention practices.
Respondents to the survey confirmed that organizations use e-mail to carry out important business decisions and that the problems surrounding the management of e-mail have been recognized. In the absence of a comprehensive technological solution, a standard response has been to instruct users to actively manage their own mail or print important messages out to paper.
All of the professionals we interviewed identified user education, awareness, and compliance as formidable obstacles to overcome in enforcing an effective policy for managing e-mail records. The enormous volume of e-mail transmitted daily at a corporation such as Microsoft precludes a workable scheme for managing e-mail messages company-wide. Instead, the Archives group at Microsoft is proactively targeting divisions of the company where the most important business transactions take place, such as the executive offices, public relations, and market research, in order to educate users and establish policies for managing e-mail. In addition, the group encourages employees to mail specific types of e-mail (such as documentation of policy shifts) directly to the Archives. (Dirks 1997)
Incorporating an effective, enterprise-wide policy for managing e-mail will most likely have its roots in applying a specific set of solutions to a specific set of problems at the workgroup level. Two representatives we spoke to from a major credit card service company have constructed a Microsoft Access database for storing and organizing their e-mail messages. In essence, the database functions as a "profile" of e-mail transactions by indexing the messages using relevant header information (date set, sender, addressee, response date), while the actual messages are stored in folders in the Microsoft Mail utility (Erickson and Ward 1997). The Access database is by no means an operational records management program per se, as it neither addresses retention and destruction of e-mail records nor groups them by record series or content. The decision to save each message for seven years is motivated by legal requirements rather than by a judgment of its value and usefulness to the company. The Access database, however, can be seen as an interim solution to managing records in a large and decentralized corporation, and it certainly indicates that businesses do experiment with innovative ways of managing their e-mail. Smaller, central, shared databases built for workgroups that are similar, using software found on every employee's desktop, could serve as a model for managing e-mail on a smaller, context-sensitive level, and could eventually serve as a model for a corporate-wide e-mail management strategy.
Storage location, classification, and retention are among the other most pressing concerns in the management of e-mail. Microsoft, for example, stores e-mail messages on its servers, which are backed up every night on to tape (Dirks 1997). The problem then becomes how to manage the data tapes, and how long to retain the backups themselves. Although e-mail may be stored in a central database or on tapes, typically no efforts to classify or group messages to facilitate searching by header information are being made, except minimally by employees who file messages into folders within their existing e-mail system. Inconsistent and random classification of messages, and the absence of a retention schedule for e-mail stored on servers or tapes make retrieving messages for discovery purposes very difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. More importantly, many businesses rely on hard copy print outs of significant e-mail messages, belying the trust most profess in the paperless environment. One respondent clearly identified the cause of such lapses as a failure of records managers to fully accept electronic systems as capable platforms for records management (Murphy 1997).
Another significant issue raised by professionals in the private sector is how to determine retention periods for e-mail messages. One records manager who works regularly with e-mail systems suggests that companies should only store messages for five to forty-five days (Wallace 1997). He also warns against backing up messages on a server, reasoning that if the data in the message was important enough it would have been printed and that leaving too many e-mail messages in the system is akin to providing counsel with a smoking gun in the event of a discovery request. In contrast, the Information Access Manager at Coca-Cola informed us that their retention period for e-mail is eighteen months (Johnson 1997). The extended period keeps printed records to a minimum. After eighteen months, the sender of the message is prompted by the system to either delete the message or approve it for storage for another eighteen months.
Although many companies eagerly await innovative technological solutions to their e-mail problems, they have already begun taking steps to address policy development and employee education. A successful e-mail management program should maintain that e-mail must be treated in the same manner as any other form of office communication; essentially, the content of the message, and not the medium, should drive retention decisions. Most professionals we contacted, however, would prefer a software solution to the problem of managing e-mail. Businesses will have to work aggressively with software vendors to develop products that will fit with technology already in place and integrate well into an existing record retention program. Although most of the companies who responded were not currently using document management software and were not aware of any off-the-shelf products that provide records retention and destruction functionality for e-mail, Chevron identified Foremost and TRIM as two software programs which do seem to be addressing retention and disposition issues. Chevron is now engaged in testing Foremost in-house (Snyder).
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