Real Story Group. Make Better Technology Decisions.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe

E-mail mayhem and nonsense

10-Jan-2008

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Building Business Case, Marketplace at Large

I have recently become addicted to a TV program called Clean House, where they find people whose homes are a chaotic mess -- with junk and trash accumulating to the rafters -- and help them to get back to normality and common sense. The presenter Niecy Nash declares,"enough with the mayhem and nonsense!"

As I am researching e-mail management and archiving, it's hard not to draw parallels.

Consider this, e-mail has long been considered by many enterprises their single most critical business application. Well if that is the case, then why can nobody be bothered to manage it properly? Why do they let it get completely out of control, with users generating mountains of pointless messages that have lost their value, and bringing mail servers to near breaking point? And remember e-mail is by far the largest form of content to be found in an enterprise -- often many times the volume of all other unstructured content put together. It's a conundrum for I have several thoughts.

Firstly, I think that IT is well aware of the issue, and considers it a behavior/policy matter. Since business behavior and policy may not fall within their domain of experience (or actual authority) they either ignore the issue, or deal with the problem by setting arbitrary mailbox limits that simply drive everyone crazy.

Secondly, the solutions available in the marketplace today that deal with managing and archiving these e-mail mountains are based on content and records management approaches that focus on dealing with complete business records, not snippets of fragmented conversations. In short, there is a mismatch between the solutions on offer and the reality they are supposed to deal with.

Thirdly, people have only just woken up to the scale of the problem, and now realize it's so bad that the best course of action is to close the eyes and pretend it's not happening at all.

The bottom line is that e-mail is not being controlled effectively and advice currently remains in short supply (and often overly complex and confusing when available). In the research we will publish later this year we intend to cut through the confusion, get down to basics, evaluate definitively what works and what doesn't, and at least contribute to the cleaning of the e-mail house.