Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

THE KNOWLEDGE VALUE OF EMAIL
By Debbie Moffat

A great deal of "corporate knowledge" takes residence in the form of email. Indeed, about 35 percent of the business information used in day-to-day business is stored in email messaging systems. A growing number of organizations around the world are beginning to recognize email as a corporate asset, but for the most part they have been powerless to gain control or do anything constructive with this intellectual property.

Mining and managing the information contained in email is a challenge that is more demanding than simply moving bits and bytes to tape. The key to finding the "knowledge value" of corporate email lies in the ability to access, understand and use these archived messages in beneficial and collaborative ways. Email records need to be quickly and easily captured and archived so that they become part of the available corporate information repository.

Hidden Knowledge Assets

Important email information is often hidden from the rest of the organization. For the most part, individual users decide which email messages will be retained or deleted. This is especially true with older email messages. For example, when an employee leaves an organization or is otherwise unavailable, the knowledge assets contained in their email store are generally unattainable or, in the worst case, lost for good.

Even when employees are on the job, lost or unavailable email presents a problem. If a typical user reaches the capacity of their allotted email store (a common occurance in many companies), what are the alternatives at that point? He or she can either delete messages arbitrarily, or save email to network file servers and/or a local hard drive. Both of these ad hoc alternatives ultimately inhibit an organization's ability to maximize and benefit from the value of email.

Ultimately, turning email into an asset requires the ability to facilitate an exchange of knowledge between people. A foundation of email knowledge exchange is the ability to tap into the vast store of information captured in email repositories, yet the existence and location of archived email is oftentimes unknown to the workers throughout an organization. Employees need to be able to access from their desktop relevant information created anywhere in the company.

Access to Email Archives is Problematic

Most companies have backup procedures for email, many backup on a daily basis. Yet a majority of users cannot access the backup without getting an administrator involved. And the time it takes to actually retrieve a message is so long (an average of about five hours) that many users simply recreate the message. Research indicates that it takes email administrators about 2 hours to recover a message if it is recent (within a month), and often several days (if at all) if the message is over a year old. Let's face it, by that time many users have given up. The result is that valuable information is lost and time is wasted looking for or recreating messages. The fact is that the retrieval process in many companies is simply too bothersome for most users, or it lacks the timeliness that they require.

Statutory Retention Regulations

Effective management of email archives is essential in order to comply with statutory regulations and other compulsory policies. Non-compliance of these retention requirements exposes an organization to the risk of fines and penalties, shareholder mistrust and diminished customer confidence.

Laws relating to document retention vary depending on your industry and your location. Some legal retention periods stretch from seven to 15, and even up to 26 years. For example, many manufacturing organizations need to archive their email due to an Office of Fair Trading ruling (Lloyds of London recently issued a directive for their members to retain email for seven years). In the United States, organizations are scrambling to comply with a variety of new legislation (the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Privacy Act are two good examples).

A study conducted by EDUCOM discovered that while 79 percent of the organizations we surveyed were aware of legislative requirements to retain business documents, only 57 percent had a formal policy regarding email retention. Even more surprising, 100 percent of the companies we interviewed left it up to the end user to determine which messages are archived and which are deleted.

In short, email represents a significant corporate asset. Unfortunately, the bulk of this information is generally hidden from or unavailable to the whole of the company. Recovering lost email is time consuming for administrators and frustrating for users, and existing email archive strategies often prove inadequate to comply with statutory and regulatory requirements.

Author's Bio

Debbie Moffat is the Managing Director with EDUCOM TS Inc and a twenty-three year IT veteran. EDUCOM TS Inc is an industry leader in the development of software solutions focused on the mission-critical management of corporate email archiving and retrieval. Through our proven technology, our strategic relationships with partners and resellers, and our keen grasp of global regulatory issues, EDUCOM delivers a second-to-none solution to the international business market. The company's flexible products enable clients to efficiently meet various email retention requirements, protect their intellectual property, enhance user access to information, and reduce email server overload. Its flagship product, Exchange Archive Solution (EAS), offers intelligent management for Microsoft Exchange email stores. EAS-Wireless is designed to manage the email of mobile users. EDUCOM is located in Ottawa, Canada. For more information, visit www.educomts.com.