e-Mail Management Nick Wensley

e-Mail Management Background History The Future What do we need to do? How do we do it? Why do we need to do it? Summary Questions?

Background and History E-mail is growing at an ever increasing pace – we currently send over 35bn e-mails daily (Forrester Research) E-mail has rapidly become a business critical system containing much business and commercial data Often no rules applied to e-mail and e-mail management – often treated like a conversation or a telephone call!

The Future E-mail will continue to grow and become all pervasive, paper trails will disappear People’s In-Boxes will fill to overflowing People and organisations will not be able to find things We are likely to end up in a worse state than we have with our paper records!

What do we need to do? Introduce effective e-mail management policies, practices and procedures Provide guidelines to staff concerning saving and deleting e-mails Provide guidelines on the use of e-mail and the content of e-mail Monitor compliance

How do we do it? You need an e-mail policy and set of procedures and practices that implement the policy. Templates exist that can be used as a basis for introducing a level of discipline into an organisation

Why do we need to do it? Get the processes right before you try to introduce any form of ‘automation’ Danger of creating a “digital landfill” if a storage-based e-mail management strategy is adopted Danger of actually increasing organisational and compliance risks

Summary Get the basics right E-mail management is primarily a business issue Deal with the business problem first then look to find a suitable technical solution Putting limits on mailbox sizes is not e-mail management! But 65% of organisations think this is enough! A lot of benefit can be gained from introducing some simple and effective rules A lot of money can be wasted buying a costly solution and, in many cases, it is likely to make things worse.

Final Thought!