A battle is taking place over email, wikis, blogs, and IM. Many companies want to manage, control, and, ultimately, delete messages and other types of electronic content not deemed as “official” records. Companies want to ensure that official documents are maintained only in centralized archives— and delete everything else. Employees are fighting back, holding onto and saving all of their email messages, spurning companies’ deletion attempts. They are retaining this information in unofficial places, including PST files, hard drives, USB drives, and driving “underground archiving” many other places “on the edge.”

Email Is a Business Document
IM, blogging, and twittering are joining email as always-in-contact communication mechanisms. Here’s the catch: these communications, when sent from a company system, are business documents, subject to the same discovery and regulatory controls as paper documents. The courts have long held that the content of the document is key—the medium is irrelevant.

Employees may not view the personal email sent from a company system or the risqué IM coming across the company Blackberry as a real business document. But the courts and regulators do, and when companies enter into litigation or some type of regulatory discovery, they have an obligation to find all documents— wherever they may exist. During a discovery, there is no distinction between “official” records and informal documents.

Many courts also have rules that there’s no distinction in accessibility between a centralized archive and someone’s laptop or a USB drive. Corporate record retention policies offer no protection; it’s not what you should have, it’s what you do have. And with discovery costs comprising at least half of the costs of litigation, this explosion of electronic messaging is driving up the cost of litigation. Ouch.

Companies Try and Delete–Underground Archival Takes Off Stung by expensive discovery costs and rogue emails, and abetted by IT storage managers who want to keep data storage costs down, many companies have implemented 30- or 60-day email and electronic message deletion policies. If we get rid of the message before there is a reasonable anticipation of discovery corporate counsel and IT managers think, we save time, money, and disk space. Furthermore, the thinking goes, we can teach employees how to classify the few “official” emails. All’s well, right?

One problem: it doesn’t work. Of the more than one hundred medium and large companies we have analyzed, all of those with aggressive 30- or 60-day email deletion policies didn’t actually delete messages. They did drive underground archival, making emails more difficult and expensive to discover.

What Works While failed strategies are abundant, don’t give up, this is a solvable problem. First, companies need to recognize that employees will save email. Capture and control of email works. If companies can capture a copy of email coming in and out of the server, they will always have a copy and can find it easier. Likewise, if older emails are captured in an email archival system, the systems permit expiration (deletion) of older email. Hence companies that capture email are in a better position to control their use and ultimate deletion. Ironically, companies that archive email— and keep it for a reasonable amount of time to avoid underground archival—have less accumulated email than those that try and delete email after 60 days.

Training works. Companies need to train their employees that every message sent or received on a company system is a business document. The company needs to explain to its employees that it doesn’t want to be Big Brother, but rather it has a legal and regulatory responsibility to manage its business documents. It’s also important to reaffirm that every message that an employee sends can be reviewed by the employee’s boss and the director of HR. If you want to chat up your hot date on Friday night, that’s fine, just use your own personal email account. Wow, thinks the employee, maybe I should be careful about what email I send at work. That’s exactly the behavior you want to drive.

--Mark Diamond (mdiamond@contoural.com ) is president and CEO for Contoural (www.contoural.com), a consulting firm for storage issues. Mark is a leader in applying the lifecycle services approach to storage.