A battle is taking place in companies across the country over email. Many companies want to manage, control, and ultimately delete email. But employees are fighting back by saving all of their email messages, spurning companies’ deletion attempts. The scope of the battle is expanding. It now includes instant messages, voicemail, and other types of electronic messages. The current score: Companies 0, Employees 1.
Email becomes a real business document
The Internet is changing the landscape of corporate record keeping. Email and other types of electronic messages have become the de facto means of business communication. IM, blogging, and twittering are joining email as the always-online, always-in-communication mechanism. Here’s the catch: When email, IM, and other digital forms of communications are sent from a company system, they are considered business documents subject to the same discovery and regulatory controls as paper documents. The courts have long held that the medium of a document is irrelevant-- it’s the content, stupid! Hence, there’s no difference between an email and a paper printout of that same email. They’re all business documents.
Here’s where the problems start for companies. Employees may not view personal email or IM messages sent from a company system as business documents. But the courts and regulators do. When companies enter into litigation or some type of regulatory discovery, they have an obligation to find all documents -- wherever they reside. During a discovery, there is no distinction between "official" records and informal documents. And with discovery comprising at least half or more of the expenses, this explosion of electronic messaging is driving up the cost of litigation. Ouch.
Companies try and delete – underground archival takes off
Stung by expensive discovery costs, many companies have implemented 30- or 60-day email and electronic message deletion policies. Corporate counsel and IT managers usually say, "If we get rid of the message before there is a reasonable anticipation of discovery, we can save time, money, and disk space." Furthermore, the thinking goes, "If we can teach employees how to classify the few ‘official’ emails, all’s well, right?"
Great idea, except for one little problem: It doesn’t work. Based on approximately 100 medium and large companies we’ve analyzed, all businesses with aggressive 30- or 60-day email deletion policies didn’t actually delete messages. All they did was drive underground archival.
Employees will save email messages everywhere -- in offline email PST files, iPods, USB drives, and company share drives. We find that aggressive deletion policies tend to drive messages into the nooks and crannies of the IT storage infrastructure. The email is there, but it just takes more time and effort to find it.
Why do employees save email? There are a number of reasons, but they usually boil down to two: productivity and CYA (cover your ass). Since email is the de facto communication mechanism, it also serves as an effective institutional memory for employees. Need to know what you discussed at the beginning of the quarter? The first place most people look is in their email.
As for CYA, most major decisions are communicated (or at least confirmed) via email. People will save these messages in case they are questioned later -- it’s simple human nature. As powerful as the attempts are for companies to stop or penalize underground archival, equally strong are employee motives to save these messages. The companies are losing.
What works – archiving and training
Although we’ve seen many failed strategies for taming the electronic message beast, businesses shouldn’t give up. This is a solvable problem.
First, companies need to recognize that employees will save email. Instead of trying to aggressively delete email, companies are better off capturing and controlling it, typically through email and IM archival systems.
If email messages are captured in an archival system, the system will permit expiration (deletion) of older email. Hence, companies that capture email are in a better position to control their use and ultimate deletion. Ironically, we’re finding that companies that archive email -- and keep it for a reasonable amount of time to avoid underground archival -- actually accumulate less email than businesses that try to delete email after 60 days.
The second area many companies aren’t taking advantage of is training. Businesses should teach employees that all messages sent or received on a company system are business documents that can be discovered by the company. Employees need to know that their company has a legal and regulatory responsibility to manage its business documents.
It’s also important to reaffirm that every message an employee sends can be reviewed by a manager and the director of human resources. So, if an employee wants to chat up their hot date on Friday night, that’s fine. They’ll just have to use their personal email account. For companies, winning the fight against underground archival is about using what works. You may not be able to control the information beast, but you can create a happy coexistence.
— Mark Diamond, Founder, President, and CEO of Contoural Inc.
Mark Diamond's "Why Companies Are Losing the Battle to Control Email" voices a fundamental problem in the way authored content (as opposed to legacy content or external content) is managed in an enterprise.
Mark has articulated the symptoms very well. But the root cause needs to be understood with perspective and recent history. When email burst into the scene in the mid-90s people got quickly used to the idea of messages that come to them with speed and reliablity. Enterprises simply used the same in communicating among their employees. And IM, blogs, and other addressed notifications fell into the same pattern of addressing the individual.
Historically, this was a huge change and a monumental mistake. At work everyone of us receive or reply to business messages in the context of a business purpose - AND in the capacity of a role, or roles, that we assume. We assume these roles and conduct ourselves to fulfill what is expected from those roles. We write and reply with the authority granted to us through those roles, and for the purpose of furthering the purpose of a specific business context. We wiped out almost 250 years of tradition by addressing individuals. And no, group addresses dont cut it.
Mark, and some of the comments point out the difference between private and business emails. We have found that a team, group, departmental, or enterprise wide structure of business contexts where all authored content such as emails, IM, blogs, documents are managed around these business contexts as a set of "Unified Business Information Services" is powerful, elegant, and simple.
Most importantly it inherently takes care of the trinity of business information essentials - Security, Compliance, and Search.
eDiscovery becomes a matter of identifying contexts that relate to the "matter" under litigation. Select the contexts, and sequester their contents.
Contextual email brings back a very professional habit of the past. One writes after the subject (or context has been identified) and so that little step of identifying the contexts places the employee in a different frame of mind - that of the role she is occupying. Switching back to being a private person, she can write about her date, but the context is presumed to be private.
Business email, documents, and other similar digital and physical content can now be seen as a separate layer that runs above the plain old email. It is something like the arrival of "Fed-Ex" when all we had was the plain old postal service.
I don't think it's that simple. For one, I bet a sufficiently large company is at any time involved in one or more lawsuits. Secondly, I assume the cost of discovery is not so much in locating the archives, but having a person (at an attorney's hourly rate, ouch!) go through 50,000 e-mail messages - per employee, that is. Please correct me if I'm wrong, anyone.
The only way to avoid that, is to not have any archives to browse through. Then the attorney will maybe spend a day trying to find archives that aren't there, and that's it.
But yes, besides serving as a subsitute for my bad memory, the CYA argument has always been a motivation for me to archive my e-mails.
What if companies would just host their mail servers offshore? Tokelau, maybe? As long as the communication links are secure and fast enough there shouldn't be a practical difference. Then when they're sued over anything, the plaintiff would need to go through international treaties to get access to the mail archives and if you pick the right country for hosting I bet that could be as nearly impossible as you want.
My employer instituted a 1-year email retention policy a couple of years ago, but the problems I work with sometimes stretch over longer periods of time. Worse yet, the blame game has no time limits, and angry customers will often sic the Prez on the grunts; out of necessity, I underground-archive. The Company instituted the policy to limit growth of required fileservers (some people store everything in email, even though embedded files get bigger), but I'm willing to bet the discovery thing was a close second as justification.
I understand that this underground archive needs to visible for discovery, but the Comany could make it a lot easier on itself by letting its minions know when it becomes embroiled in legal battles. We're not in a lawsuit right now (I don't think), but should I find out about one, I will be more than happy to provide my archive to our Legal staff. My managers may not be too good, but their intentions generally are, and although I hate my job, I need the paycheck, so I have no reason not to co-operate with Legal, and every reason to do so.
The bottom line is that any company wanting to reduce discovery costs (and fileserver purchases) should treat its employees as partners, not opponents. Let employees archive locally; just ask that they tell IT about it, so that they don't have to go looking for stashes. Once an individual proves himself to be obstinate, IT can take appropriate measures, rather than penalizing everybody.
I am not sure companies are loosing the battle to control e-mail. There are several corporations that have established controls to block personal e-mail accounts. Of course, there are those who find ways to circumvent the system. If a corporation can keep 90% of people adhearing to the controls, then they have won the battle.
Now that Google has added IMAP support to Gmail, I know of some companies that are struggling with employees taking their email outside company control.
Some folks find Lotus Notes to be difficult to use, for instance, so they get their email account settings from IT, and use Gmail in place of Notes.
So, yet another reason why companies are losing the battle to control Email.
My company has recently started blocking access to all personal email such as hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc and frankly it's a real pain. Now I have to go home and deal with 10000 emails!!!
You nail it. I've read numerous studies some time back when the issue of allowing internet access to employees while at work was being dabted. The forward thinking companies allowed this but did monitor. They felt if folks did this on breaks and at lunch so what ? It was a "perk" and morale booster. That was not to say they allowed access to bad sites, etc. They all checked for this.
I see similarities with email. I can see not wanting the company domain on personal email so allow access to the GUI based email. The vast majority of users will not abuse this. Just like they won't abuse internet access. Deal with the abusers in either scenario rather then punishing the many for the sins of a few.
What would be a reasonable time for companies to retain archived e-mails, and still prevent underground archival? A year? Wouldn't do it for me. I use my personal e-mail archives as a subsitute for my memory and also as an address book. Frequently I revert to my e-mail archives to remind myself of the occasions I've been in contact with someone.
What would help is at least to allow people to access their personal e-mail accounts from the office. It's a leap of faith that the employer needs to have, that people don't spend half their days writing personal e-mails, but I don't think you can entirely stop people from doing non-work-related things during work hours. Besides, I've seen people invent many different ways to waste time at work, and my take on it is that you should measure employees by their output, and not by the amount of time they spend behind their desk.
The last company I worked at blocked all access to hotmail, yahoo mail and any known ISP webmail system. What you get then is that employees use the company mail system for the occasional personal mail. If you allow access, at least you keep all the personal stuff out of your corporate mail servers.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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