- Image by Will Lion via Flickr
Ah, the wonders of hindsight. If Enron’s upper management had known their email would be involved in their downfall, they might have been more careful about what they wrote. If Morgan Stanley had been able to locate and produce all of their email in one case, they might have avoided a $15 million fine. Organizations large and small have faced problems stemming from email misuse or mishandling. Why is email so hard to manage?
Over 30 years ago, email exchange was limited to a small group of researchers who could only communicate within their own network. The total number of messages was small. But email volume grew when those researchers figured out how to send information to other networks. That opened the floodgates, and today the world exchanges over 90 billion emails each year.
Volume is only part of the problem. Email’s convenience—both its blessing and its curse—has made it a multi-purpose communication tool. If email contained only jokes or lunch invitations, or only business-critical decisions, then managing it would be easier. But the mixed bag of content, coupled with a variety of regulatory requirements that dictate what must be kept and for how long, make it impossible to apply one rule across the board.
AIIM’s Email Best Practices Group wants to help your organization deal with email. We’ve developed a document that outlines how to establish and maintain best practices for everything from creating, storing, and finding email to identifying retention requirements. Whether you’re just beginning to tackle the problem or you’d like some ideas for improvement, our best practice lists are a good place to start.
Continues @ http://www.aiim.org/email/40432
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