Email: the Headache Shared by IT, Compliance, Records Management and Legal

While email is a fantastically efficient medium for communication, it is somewhat less ideal when it comes to organizing and managing information. Email-based information is typically sequestered in various "silos", including the email server (e.g. Exchange or Lotus Notes), an email archive and in end user's mailboxes. To make matters worse, much of the information in these silos is replicated and redundant as the same message (and attached PDF or Word document) is stored across several or all of the silos.

Without the ability to organize or deduplicate this massive jumble of information, corporate IT and legal departments cannot delete any legacy email for fear of legal or regulatory repercussions (e.g. spoliation sanctions, regulatory investigations and fines, etc.), while simultaneously spending far more on IT infrastructure costs (including rack space, power, software, hardware, personnel, etc.) and IT management to maintain their highly inefficient email networks. As a result, email has come to be viewed  as an enormous source of risk - likely the single biggest such information risk.

Automated Email-based Collaboration

However, when controlled by the right tools and processes, email can not only be effectively managed for regulatory and compliance risks but can also present a huge opportunity for enterprises to collaborate, transfer knowledge and work more productively.

Automated email management systems aide collaboration and knowledge transfer. When email is stored in silos, it is difficult to quickly and seamlessly transition when a key team member departs a team or the company.  When email is automatically filed into project folders accessible to a team, this exercise is much more efficient and reduces the risk of a new employee seeing private or otherwise inappropriate information. Using an automated categorization system, email is efficiently filed and accessible to those who need it.

Address Email-based Compliance, Records Management and eDiscovery Concerns

Email also poses a significant challenge when meeting compliance obligations. Automated email management tackles this challenge by using innovative techniques to ensure that email-based information is properly tagged and categorized with little to no impact on busy professionals. Messages that are filed by one person in the organization are automatically tagged as filed for other recipients of that same email. Messages are stored and displayed in a way that allows users to access them as if they were in Microsoft Outlook; in other words, users can see and access any email-based information regardless of where such information resides. And Decisiv Email Management not only gives users a record of all the messages they have filed, but it provides a complete view of all correspondence for a client/project/matter even if the user was not on the email distribution list.

Learn more about how Recommind's Decisiv Email Management can address compliance, records management and eDiscovery concerns.