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You've Got Mail - LOTS of mail
Author: Graham Bucknall
Published: August 2006
The amount of data generated by the average
business is growing every day – and the rate of this growth is
accelerating. As the mountain of information swells, HR, legal and
regulatory developments - such as Data Protection and Freedom of
Information - are all putting pressure on companies to ensure electronic
data management is taken seriously. Yet, despite the amount of sleep
being lost over these issues, only a small minority of businesses are
taking the kind of strategic approach necessary to transform business
data into an asset.
Paradoxically, the cause of this potential data problem is the very
thing which was supposed to make life easier. Increasingly sophisticated
software - together with ever cheaper and more powerful hardware - means
huge amounts of business is now conducted online.
Ensuring current information is instantly and easily accessible, while
managing older data to prevent it from becoming a confusing,
productivity-damaging mess is key. Nowhere is this challenge more
universally acute than in the area of email.
In a large number of businesses, individual employees are left to take
responsibility for their own filing, back-ups and archiving. This will
often end in confusing set-ups which are both massively inefficient and
totally incomprehensible. This challenge – along with its associated
monetary costs, risk of data-loss and damage to productivity – is most
often tackled in two stages of sophistication.
The first sees prescriptive technical limits set on employees’ use of
company IT resources. For example, IT managers might set a limit on the
size of a worker’s email inbox, automatically archive messages after a
fixed period, or put restrictions on sending attachments. Such an
approach will often be reinforced with HR policies, setting out rules
for acceptable use of email and internet – banning the forwarding of
“joke” emails, for example, can save resources and improve security.
However, in practice, such approaches can prove unwieldy on their own.
People will always be able to provide a good argument as to why they
should be an exception to blanket technical limitations. Maybe their job
requires them to receive large, high-resolution pictures which quickly
exceed their inbox or attachment quota, for example.
There is also no escaping human nature. No matter how dire the
threatened consequences, the temptation to forward the latest faked
video of Zinadine Zidane head-butting Fidel Castro to 20 colleagues can
simply be too much to resist.
The second stage, therefore, is to look for smarter ways to manage large
volumes of information, by blending policy, process and technology.
Employees may occasionally need to access emails from three years ago,
but why should these take up prime storage space on the office server?
If a particular message has not been accessed for 6 months, for example,
it could be moved automatically to a long-term, off-site facility, where
access is marginally slower, but also much more cost-effective. The user
would still be able to see the email header alongside more current
emails and, apart from a few seconds’ delay while the body of the
message was retrieved, would still have completely transparent access.
Smart email-handling solutions can identify situations where the same
attachment is being sent back and forth between email recipients on the
network – potentially wasting huge amounts of storage space – and
automatically save just one copy of the attachment. Each individual
email would still link back to that single copy, again ensuring a
completely seamless experience for users, while saving storage
resources.
There may even be circumstances in which email has traditionally been
the medium of choice, but is no longer the most efficient way of doing
business. For example, the development of technologies such as
Sharepoint Portal Server provides a far more intuitive platform for
collaboration - incorporating chat, online whiteboard facilities and
document versioning functionality. By moving previously email-intensive
activities onto such platforms, businesses can more easily break-down
and manage the information being generated and stored, as well as
enforcing proper workflow.
The only way to ensure exploding data volumes continue to support the
business, rather than becoming an overhead, is to adopt a strategy in
which smart technology supports sensible policy and best practice – not
the reverse. Keeping a firm grip on information resources can lower
costs, improve security, boost productivity and, most importantly, allow
business owners to lose sleep over more important things.
About
the Author
Graham Bucknall is director of strategy for Scotsys, which supports
companies throughout Scotland on their IT and data issues.
graham.bucknall@scotsys.co.uk
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