New publication: Examining the issues & challenges of email & e-communications

Email is “not quite as dangerous as a chainsaw being wielded by a drunken person in a crowded shopping mall, but…it is a powerful tool…”

“when people join your organisations, they should take the email test”

“there are organisations that would rather keep everything because it’s easier”, and

“we’ve invested in technology without thinking about the long term implications and funding those implications as part of a life-cycle of the investment”

are just some of the sound bites in the proceedings of the 2nd Northumbria University International Witness Seminar Conference, 2007.

Held in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, Examining the issues & challenges of email & e-communications - Exploring strategies with Experts was an innovative event that gathered experts from around the world to discuss the business, people and technology perspectives of managing email records.

To find out who said these words and hear the views of the experts gathered (including Reynolds Cahoon, Adrian Cunningham, Jonathan Downes, Heather Jack, John McDonald, Martin Sanderson and Ian Wooler) order a copy of the conference proceedings today. The printed proceedings contain the (edited) verbatim content of the entire event and a CD of the proceedings in searchable form, the audio recording of the witnesses and photographs.

Cost: 49.00 Sterling or 25.00 Sterling for full-time students, including post & packaging. To order send the following details to sarah.howells@northumbria.ac.uk

· Contact name
· Name of organisation to be invoiced
· Address
· Number of copies

“Not Quite As Dangerous As A Chainsaw” – The Use of Training

"Other professionals, other users - we need to get them involved" -

Chair commenting on someone's comments from the 24/10/07 session

“The act, process, or method of one that trains b: the skill, knowledge, or experience acquired by one that trains.”

Merriam-Webster, Incorporated (2006-2007) Definition of training – Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Available at: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/training (Accessed: 21/11/07)

“An organizational and personal tool…and as a tool, it’s only as useful, or as useless, beneficial, or dangerous, as the skill or knowledge of the user allow(s). It’s obviously not quite as dangerous as a chainsaw being wielded by a drunken person in a crowded shopping mall, but…it is a powerful tool…”

Catherine Hare. 25/11/07

This very strong image gives us a specific reason why training should be a considered concept with the use of email. Any tool will require the establishment of a basic training routine. However, with the use of email comes the concept of a tool which can be put to multiple purposes. Not only can email be used as a work tool, which can be applicable within and without the company, it also can have a function where it acts as a personal communication service, a repository for information, and has the potential to be either misused or abused.

We have heard that email archiving software can be a quick fix. If we can talk possessively about email – ‘my inbox’ - then we are in need of training and guidance in order that we feel that we are in charge of our email, and not the other way round. Training acknowledges there are standards: compliance has ‘raised the bar’.

Clearly, what we need is a method by which we can establish the key skills of email within the company so that email does become a ‘beneficial’ tool rather than the chainsaw of the example.

Training should first and foremost inform and teach. Training should look at enabling the trainee to behave in an appropriate manner with the tool, and to be corrected when it is not used appropriately to ensure that negligent or malicious behaviour does not go uncorrected. Email abuse (ranging from harassment of employees and colleagues to issues such as spam, or the inadvertent divulgence of sensitive information) can constitute this behaviour.

In order to ensure that users can work with this tool, training should be developed and given. Training can reinforce positive values and training will not reward abuse and misuse of email. It has been suggested that users should undertake an ‘email health check’ – especially in the light of the amount of email accounts that some professionals handle. Another suggestion is an email driving licence - 'licence to email'.

How would one of these training regimes be built? One suggestion on how to deal with abuse of email, and abuse by using email, is ‘the three degrees’:

1. “Having a good, workable communications policy”

• This point extols the virtues of communication, and being able to explain – one of the most important aspects of training – why members of a company are not permitted to go outside the regulations for acceptable IT use. The ‘preparation of a workable policy’

2. “…having a good grievance policy in place”

• Solving problems and acknowledging any grievances that those in the company may have when training is not followed, such as breech of policy.

3. “…having the bravery to go through discipline procedure with those people who’ve breeched policies…”

• In order to maintain a policy about the way that email will work, it has to be made clear that the rules cannot be bent.

How, and when, should we establish training needs and activities in the workplace? Are they to be administered like a basic skill, or as a reinforcement of what we already know?

Keep everything?

In my opening introduction at our Witness Conference on the challenges of managing email, I quoted from an article by Adam Gifford (New Zealand Herald, 14 March 2007): “emails can’t be thrown away.” Email ‘archiving’ software is often marketed on the fact that retention of email doesn’t need to managed closely, that everything can easily be retained and, importantly, easily retrieved. But I asked (rhetorically) “surely I’m not the only person here who has trouble with the concept of needing to keep all emails for legal or any other purposes?”

In a later seminar the notion of ‘keeping everything’ was raised and lead to some real debate.

What are the arguments for keeping all emails vs managing their retention according to value, record series etc? What are the benefits and the risks? Which approach do you support and why?

E-communications and changing organizational contexts

One strand of thought started at October's Witness Seminar Conference explored the idea that the use and management of e-communications could not be considered in isolation from the changing nature of organizations and organizational culture; that the now multifarious and ubiquitous e-communication technologies and practices have both shaped and been shaped by such changes, and that this has profound implications for the way in which records management programmes should be conceived and implemented. A couple of aspects of this theme are summarized here.

There has been a shift from traditional, hierarchical, bureaucratic and largely monolithic business organizations to a networked model involving multiple organizations in multiple jurisdictions. This has been largely enabled through the communications revolution brought about by the use of e-mail and more recent technologies. The processes of a given business function – and the records of those processes – are spread well beyond a single organization, yet many records management programmes are still conceptualized in terms more suited to the traditional organization.

Who owns the records of these processes? Will there come a time when records managers have responsibility for managing a process, or group of processes, across organizational boundaries rather than for managing all the records of a single organization? Of what value is compliance as a ‘big stick’ when the global organization can simply shift operations to more lightly regulated jurisdictions?

A parallel change has occurred in the relationship between organizations and their staff, effectively altering the ‘psychological contract’ entered into by both parties, and in the nature of the work carried out by an increasing number of employees. Again, e-communication technologies both reflect and help power these changes. The organization no longer offers secure employment and employees are, in response, more individualistic and less corporate in their approach to the information and records they create, use and manage. They see these records as their own resource, and as part of the knowledge capital to be accumulated and carried on to their next job.

Furthermore, many employees are now knowledge workers who may work from many locations, including from home, and whose closest links and priorities may not be within their organization at all but with external entities – clients, funding bodies, suppliers, professional peers. This fragmentation of lines of responsibility and blurring of boundaries, coupled with a more individualistic and self-interested attitude to information and records, may require a re-evaluation of an approach to recordkeeping based primarily on corporate guidelines and obligations.

In the same way that the focus for records management may have to shift at the level of the overall business mission to managing the records of the process, not the organization, could it be that the recordkeeping responsibilities of employees will become a matter of individual contractual obligation, tailored to meet the needs and expectations of both employer and employee in each separate case?

Security v Sharing

Any data packet sent across the network is vulnerable to a hacker, and even if encrypted can be decrypted relatively easily. Absolute security of information and access to information, e.g. via emails for sharing or for records management, are mutually excusive. You can't maximise both security and access; maximising one will minimise the other and vice versa. One Witness Seminar participant stated that if an email contains business critical information then it must have a security policy applied to and should not be shared; as soon as you start sharing information you have leakage. This statement caused immediate responses from other participants. One said that if you take away the point of sharing email you have no email. Another said that if you don’t share you have no business. In a construction project for example, sharing of information has to occur across organisational and often national boundaries. So how can we square this circle?

Witness Seminar on Email and E-Communications - The Debate Continues

The University of Northumbria recently ran a successful Witness Seminar - Examining the issues & challenges of email & e-communications - in Newcastle on 24th to 25th October. The conference organisers were the AC⁺erm project team.

The Witness Seminar participants expressed an interest in continuing the debate on email and e-communications. We are therefore posting a few challenging topics that arose during the Seminar for further discussion on our AC⁺erm project blog. Please feel free to comment. If you want to start a new thread on a completely different topic, then just email us at eb.acerm@northumbria.ac.uk with the details. If the discussion proves popular, we've other threads from the Seminar to raise in the near future.

• Witness Seminar 2007 http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/conf/wit07/?view=Standard
  
• Witness Seminar 2006 http://northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ceis/re/isrc/conf/wit06/?view=Standard

The AC⁺erm Project Team