and work on projects for Enterprise Content Management within the Information Management Competence Group of BearingPoint. They have more than 10 years experience in ECM software. BearingPoint is an independent management and technology consultancy. Owned and operated by its Partners throughout Europe, BearingPoint is offering its clients the best possible value in terms of tangible, measurable results by leveraging business and technology expertise. The company currently employs 3,250 people in 14 European countries and is serving commercial, financial and public services clients.
AIIM has a comprehensive e-mail management training program for those who wish to get serious about managing e-mail.
8 things you need to remember about message/e-mail archiving
1 -- Have a well defined and detailed calculated business case.
Organizations are facing various challenges to take back control and unlock business value of content, especially in e-mails. The business case for e-mail management is driven by four challenges:
- Archive e-mail and content for storage space management in order to reduce operational costs introduced by the increasing volume and size of e-mails and multiple formats of content types
- Manage e-mail and content for legal obligations to comply with different rules and regulations which create duties of evidence and documentation, facilitate eDiscovery or indicate supervision and monitoring for non-compliance
- Combine e-mail and content to other loosely managed content to minimize risks caused by increased organizational scale and complexity, changed speed and style of communication, lost knowledge.
- Manage e-mail and content to gain efficiency. Associate e-mail and content to processes and business applications to accelerate business processes
In your business case you should state the cost savings for annual storage increase, maintenance, saving in licenses and data center cost. May be you save licenses cost due to decommission. For the case of compliance you should state the costs of eDiscovery minimum for the last two years and the savings. Input factors for calculation are for example the number of discoverable custodian mailboxes, the number of eDiscovery events per year, the cost of IT including administrator work, the cost of tape restoration and the cost of attorney services.
Beside these quantifiable there are also qualitative benefits, e.g. improved search facilities. These benefits should not be underestimated.
2 -- Have the right stakeholders onboard.
A project for message archiving affects the entire organization. The solution needs consensus and corporation of at least three departments: IT, Legal/Compliance and Business. Unfortunately they often fail to communicate effectively with each other and within the department. Historical communications barriers must be broken down. A new understanding of roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders must be set up to gain senior management support. At most they discuss topics of budget, retention and disposition or policies/procedures.
3 -- Stakeholders should be aware of their requirements.
Stakeholders should structure their requirements in functional, legal and technical requirements. The requirements must be weighed between “must-have” and “nice-to-have”. Typical primary categories for functional requirements are capture, attachment handling, indexing, search/retrieval and offline support. Support of legal hold and supervision are examples for requirements of the Legal/Compliance department. Questions of architecture, integration, security and confidentiality are raised by the IT department during the evaluation process of a vendor solution.
4 -- Have a policy in place.
In 2008 BearingPoint conducted a survey on e-mail management among 500 companies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. One key finding was that e-mail management is more than saving storage costs! The most important aspects are
- Search & Find
- Existence of written rules to handle e-mails (policies)
- Avoidance of risks, such as in cases of violation of laws or deadlines to be missed
- Alignment with business processes
Only 22% of the participating companies responded, that they had companywide policies. Existing policies covered the use of private e-mails (67%), mailbox size (62%) and offensive content (53%). Monitoring is centrally organized (50%). The Chief Information Officer (CIO) is responsible for preparing and monitoring the compliance of rules (37%).
The policy for e-mail archiving should be developed by all stakeholders. It should contain goals, aspects of usage and allowance, legal issues, ownership and security, retention and disposition.
5 -- Think about retention and disposition.
Companies that start e-mail archiving projects can be divided into five categories. On the one extreme there are companies that allow their employees to keep all e-mails forever. On the other extreme there are companies that force the deletion of every message. Between these two extremes, there are companies which try to manage their e-mails. The most common method for this is “restricted retention”. With this approach, companies limit the amount of messages a user can store. Another approach is “risk based retention”. Based on the risk, that an e-mail will have to be restored due to legal obligations, different categories are set up. The last method is “context based retention”, where e-mails are classified based on their context. E-mails within that category are archived with the document of same type attached, e.g. an e-mail containing contract information is stored together with this contract.
The leading industry practice approach is something between the risk and context based approach.
6 -- Perform a Proof of Concept and Reference Calls.
For evaluation of the proposed solution it is helpful to perform a Proof of Concept (PoC) with at least two vendors. The objective of a PoC is to ensure that the technology will work in the client´s environment and to test certain features and functions, which have been proposed. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to describe scenarios based on the functional, legal and technical requirements. For example, how is the archive process done manually and what do the user search process and interfaces look like. The legal department will be interested in legal hold and export functionality, for example. The IT department might discuss security and architecture issues in a workshop. The IT department will suggest a bulk archiving test with tons of messages in order to get an indication for sizing, performance and scalability.
The PoC could be accompanied by references visits or at least reference calls with customers having the same challenges. It is helpful to develop a clear and structured questionnaire with your heaviest concerns. The results are part of the evaluation.
The PoC should be limited to a fixed duration of days with a presentation in front of all stakeholders and/or the senior management team.
7 -- Consider hosted SaaS model as an option.
Remotely hosted or outsourced Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions for e-mail archiving can help lower an e-mail archive’s financial need and complexity. However you may face some lacks of functionality and companies still have concerns about a compliance driven deployment for on-premise e-mail archiving and eDisovery solution.
8 -- Include other content types for archiving.
Under the amendments of the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure not only e-mail is relevant to litigation and eDiscovery. Other content types like files on shares, structured data in databases or business applications will become important for eDiscovery. So your former e-mail archiving strategy must be broader and your solution must cover these aspects.
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Some other posts that may be of interest...
8 steps you can take to better manage your inbox
8 things you need to remember about e-discovery
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