* Corporate culture outweighs benefits of archiving e-mail
There are four reasons to archive e-mail, any one of which typically can justify the expense and difficulty of doing so.
First, e-mail archiving is a compliance issue – most organizations must comply with a variety of laws and regulations surrounding the preservation of records. Second, archiving can support the discovery process during litigation. Third, archiving can help manage storage by moving storage offline to less expensive media, making e-mail server recovery faster while improving performance. Fourth, providing users with self-service to an e-mail archive can help users to be more productive by giving them access to valuable content housed within the messaging system.
However, for most organizations, the decision about e-mail archiving really comes down less to the technical or productivity advantages it provides and more to the corporate culture issues about saving e-mail and how e-mail is used.
For example, a small-cap investment firm to which I was introduced recently has faced an internal struggle about e-mail archiving. The firm’s compliance officer wants all e-mail to be preserved for obvious reasons, such as the need to remain compliant with Securities and Exchange Commission rules regarding e-mail retention. However, the firm’s legal counsel wants to purge e-mail on a regular schedule in order to limit the firm’s legal liability in the event of legal action. While both are reasonable goals, they are mutually exclusive. The compromise that the firm has come up with is to let individual users determine what should be saved and what can safely be purged. While this might not work for some firms, particularly those that are heavily regulated, it seems to work for this particular firm given the tension about e-mail archiving created by differing needs of senior managers.
In short, e-mail archiving is a decision that needs to be made based on the external pressures of things like compliance and litigation support, but also on the internal requirements of senior managers who set the tone of the corporate culture.
