Peanut butter cup phenomena: "your voice mails in my e-mail – no, your email’s in my voice mail."
Nemertes finds 53% of organizations are already using or planning to use unified messaging (UM)– integration of e-mail, voicemail and instant messaging (IM) – with another 22% evaluating. How great is that? Voice mails showing-up in e-mail boxes and e-mails being turned into voice mails. I call this the peanut butter cup phenomena: “your voice mails in my e-mail – no, your email’s in my voicemail!”
UM peanut butter cups are mighty tasty, yet they raise challenges for IT. For example, we find organizations typically delete voice mails on a monthly basis while e-mails may be kept forever; either intentionally or unintentionally. UM typically default to e-mail retention schedules. And, therefore embedded voice mails can drive e-mail storage and archive requirements through the roof. This has been enough of a challenge to stop integration of voice mails. The greatest challenge for UM is e-discovery.
To explain, I need to take a step back and talk about the primary instrument lawyers use to conduct e-discovery: The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP). These rules were amended in 2006 to reflect changes in technology. Essentially, “data compilations” – a 1970’s term that was relatively easy to work around – is now “Electronically Stored Information (ESI).” ESI refers to any byte of data that exists in the corporate digital universe: online, offline, archived, improperly deleted, meta data associated with files, etc. And format is irrelevant. However, if the data doesn’t exist then it’s not discoverable. The bottom line is retention policies are no longer just for storage management and regulatory compliance; they directly affect e-discovery.
How does one search a vmail? Should vmails follow the same retention policy as e-mails? The only way to address these issues is to shift retention policies from location-centric to content-centric. Rather than a blanket retention policy for e-mail (the way most organizations approach retention) and vmail, policies are set based on what’s in the email and vmail; shifting from medium alone to medium plus content. Embedded voice mails may then be tagged or electronically categorized as “voice mail and personal” for retention, e-discovery and indexing. Then, through the use of archiving and expiration policies that exist in all e-mail systems, different retention rules for different types of e-mail-based content is possible. Essentially, the peanut butter cup is treated differently if it’s “chocolate in peanut butter” or “peanut butter in chocolate.”
This approach has benefit beyond just UM. For example, e-mails with ephemeral content (day-to-day inter-office communications) should have a much shorter retention cycle than e-mails with health and safety content. Likewise, vmails with personnel information should have a much longer retention cycle than vmails with ephemeral content. The ultimate decision on retention is for the legal and compliance teams to decide. However, shifting from medium (e-mail or vmail) to medium plus content (personnel-related e-mail with embedded personnel-related vmail) facilitates UM without e-discovery challenges.
