Fighting back against e-mail’s assault on the network

E-mail management issues are reaching crisis levels everywhere. Vast unsustainable quantities of data are overwhelming in-boxes, networks, and back-end systems. Experts offer their advice on how to safeguard your corporate network.The sheer volume is at the core of the problem, says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, principal at CMS Watch, a Groton, MA-based content systems research firm. “It really impacts productivity and server performance. Exchange and Notes servers are running hot all the time,” he says. “And most of IT departments’ time and money is spent running e-mail systems and looking after dead, redundant information.”Improving e-mail management is a universal concern, but there’s a global divide in the factors driving this trend, he adds. “For most of the world, improving systems performance and clearing up the huge backlog is the priority. But in the US, it’s driven by fear of litigation and discovery.” When jokes are not a laughing matterIT professionals aren’t the only ones worrying about performance improvement. On the user front, management experts are sounding alarms about the need for e-mail policies, training and constraints on human behaviour. “Workers interrupted by e-mail take an average of 16.5 minutes to get back to whatever they were doing,” says Nancy Flynn, director at the ePolicy Institute, a Columbus, OH.-based consultancy. “And we know an awful lot of e-mail isn’t business-related – 86% of employees said they engage in personal e-mail at work in our 2007 survey.”Employers need to take control of their employees’ in-boxes to prevent a host of nasties: loss of productivity, lawsuits, and wasted network resources, says Flynn. The ePolicy survey indicates a growing number of organizations are casting a baleful eye on e-mail: 43% monitor their employees’ e-mail, and 28% have fired employees for excessive personal e-mail and other violations. Despite the furor, not many organizations offer real guidance about what is or isn’t appropriate. Although 76% of organizations say they have an e-mail policy in place, only 42% offer any kind of training, she says. “This is where organizations drop the ball: they don’t explain the rules governing personal and other e-mail.”Workplace jocularity is one key example. “Jokes trigger lawsuits,” she says. “It’s too easy to misunderstand them and set off claims of a hostile work environment. We advise our clients to outlaw jokes in e-mail communications.” People can still walk over to a colleague’s cubicle and tell a joke verbally if they want some levity, she adds – the point is to avoid a written trail.IT departments can help support policies by providing the right tools and technologies, she says. To modify compulsive e-mail checking behaviour, some organizations are even asking their IT staff to slow down real-time e-mail settings. “Instead of letting e-mail hit in-boxes every five minutes, they should be set to 20 or 30 minutes to limit interruptions. How many e-mails received daily are really urgent?” she says, adding that corporate policies rarely specify that e-mail must be read instantly.IT staff also need to keep senior management informed about new messaging technologies that need to be brought into the fold and governed properly, she says. “At conferences, many IT folks come up to me and say, ’We really need an IM policy and gateway management technology to manage its use but we can’t get our boss to approve the budget.’” Bosses are often out of touch and don’t realize IM software is freely available on the Web, widely used and difficult to prohibit. “Staff will bring it in through the back door and use it anyway,” she says, noting there’s greater potential for security breaches and leaks of sensitive information if files are attached and sent via personal IM tools.But there’s a growing list of horror stories that can be used to persuade senior management, she says. “In the past couple of years, there’s been an increase in the number of companies hit by multi-million dollar lawsuits due to accidents caused by employees texting while driving.” If the crash happens during business hours, a company can be held liable regardless of whether employees are driving their own car or a company car, talking or texting, or communicating for personal or business reasons, she adds. E-mail policing morphs into good data managementPelz-Sharpe agrees there’s been an increase in the number of organizations monitoring their employees’ e-mail usage, but questions whether it’s ultimately useful. “Monitoring sounds better than it actually is. We see court cases of rogue dealers at brokerages, which are required by regulators to monitor e-mail – and it doesn’t work in catching them,” he says.And even with automated monitoring, human decision-makers are still in the loop. “The system may flag questionable e-mails, but they still need to go in the workflow to a HR or legal person to decide appropriate action, and most companies can’t devote many of those resources,” he says. “The truth is, there aren’t many instances you can really point to where e-mail monitoring caught somebody, due to the sheer volume of data.”But monitoring technology is evolving in ways that are useful to both organizations and users. Automated e-mail recognition and archival software is emerging that works to tackle some underlying problems by reducing volume instead of just policing staff. The technology is a spin-off from monitoring software, and companies are starting to use it in conjunction with it, he says.“Based on keyword flagging, the software can categorize mail automatically. Sometimes it’s done to improve records management but mostly it’s done to improve productivity. Once you’re able to classify e-mail into data groups, it makes searches faster and you can shift things off to storage.”A bonus is that IT staff don’t have to rely on humans to get data off the network. “E-mail recognition software can let users off the hook in many cases,” he says. “But it depends on how tightly regulated their industry is.” Automated recognition may still be used as an adjunct to human review. “What typically happens in large organizations is that one department is more regulated than others – but for low-risk departments like accounts payable, automated tagging is often enough.”Organizations can reap huge dividends with the use of deduplication software, he says. “Volumes of data can be reduced by almost 80 percent just by getting duplicates out of e-mail attachments. And that’s a hard number that comes from our end-user surveys, as we don’t do research for vendors.”But deduplication software is more expensive than storage, and many budget-challenged IT departments may find it easier just to slap on another server. “We’re trying to fight that attitude,” he says, pointing out there may be major hidden costs lurking in cheap storage if the company is hit with a lawsuit. “One GB of storage costs about 20 cents, but legal e-discovery on that same GB is $1,500.” He points out that it’s increasingly likely an organization will face lawsuits in our litigious age – and will lose big bucks whether the case goes to court or not. “What’s happening is that companies are settling to avoid e-discovery costs. One major technology company I can’t name has a policy of settling any lawsuit that’s under $600,000 just because e-discovery is so expensive and onerous.”Like monitoring and automated recognition software, deduplication software is also evolving into an archiving tool. “E-mail is more than messages these days, it’s about attachments and business processes. By simply moving business records that can be automatically identified on a regular basis, this can run in the background without worries.” Ultimately, the best solution to e-mail management is implementing a proper archiving system with appropriate policies and procedures. “People think backup and recovery is archiving, but it’s not. A good archive can save a lot of money quickly so it pays for itself.” These issues are gaining urgency as next-generation messaging with fat video and audio attachments hit in-boxes. “Frankly, it doesn’t matter if it’s voicemail or an IM trail or whatever – it’s all data,” he says. “Once it passes through deduplication, validation and other filters, you’ll have a clean archive that can be easily searched and reduces storage and pressure on the network. Clearing the junk and archiving is the first thing everyone should be doing.” Many companies are put off by archiving, as they assume major effort is involved. Not so, he says. “Companies don’t have to really do all that much since most of it is automated. The software does hash matching by looking at attachments, and if it finds identical files, it removes all copies and links the original e-mail back to a single copy. That alone massively reduces the problem.” The archiving systems market is still in its early days, but he believes it will take off in the near future. While lawsuits are often the trigger for early adopters, these companies sing the praises of their archiving systems once they’re in place. “They may do it initially for compliance reasons, but they immediately become evangelists for archiving,” he says. “They get paybacks they weren’t expecting. This is one of the few areas of IT that you can honestly point to and say, ‘This saved me money and improved performance.’”The bigger pictureE-mail systems themselves are also morphing well beyond their original messaging purposes, says Carmi Levy, SVP at Toronto-based AR Communications. “They’re increasingly used as personal filing systems,” he says. “Many use in-boxes and folders as massive repositories of unstructured information about work and home lives.”Enterprise e-mail applications haven’t developed the capabilities of Web-based systems, largely because they’re bound by legacy systems and the unpleasant prospect of transitioning thousands of users if organizations want to switch. “Google Mail and other such applications show where enterprise e-mail needs to go – there’s no need for labels and folders as search functions can find anything, and moving from Hotmail to Google Mail is easy.”The lesson here for e-mail management lies in back-end processing performed in the cloud, he says. “This reduces the need to manage infrastructure locally, and allows organizations to focus less on keeping the pipes working physically and more on the actual processes where users get the most utility.”Levy questions whether the massive effort required within the current enterprise model is worthwhile. “As e-mail grows more sophisticated, the need for bigger boxes and IT resources to maintain them grows. The cost is onerous versus the actual utility delivered to the desktop. The question is: Are Web 2.0 applications just as capable, while also freeing up all the resources currently devoted to enterprise e-mail?”There are clear opportunities for reducing the costs of managing IT infrastructure in this space, as messaging systems are evolving far more rapidly than other office applications such as Word, which hasn’t changed significantly in a decade, he says. “For IT staff looking for low-hanging fruit to take a knife to, this area is ripe.”He points out it’s only a question of time before Web e-mail applications are indistinguishable from conventional client-server applications. “Many users are quietly starting to use Web applications as adjuncts to the official enterprise applications they’re given as a way to share data between work and home or collaborate with teams. They’re finding their own solutions, whether they’re sanctioned or not – we’re seeing grass roots revolution.”Creative solutions lie in viewing this as a messaging opportunity instead of an e-mail problem, he says. “E-mail is just one of many channels. Progressive organizations are looking at e-mail as a part of a larger solution and fitting it in along with other tools.” For example, project teams that are geographically separated may need collaboration tools such as whiteboards, shared workspaces and multimedia tools to work effectively, not just bigger pipes. The biggest trend in enterprise telecom today is unified communications (UC) that merges all channels into one consolidated in-box, he says. “The ultimate goal is to have voice, video and text on the same channel.”There are larger questions IT departments have to decide that go well beyond e-mail management. “Does it make sense for them to build up UC capabilities, or do they just make sure the pipes are big enough and then outsource the whole thing? I think IT must get out of the business of managing boxes in the long term. It isn’t a core competency for most companies, and they can’t continue to deploy advanced technology in the same way they have in the past.”

Fighting back against e-mail’s assault on the network

News | 09/11/2008 2:03 pm EDT

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