It’s 10pm, Do You Know Where your e-mail is?

The Bush White House e-mail controversy which surfaced in 2007 has been stealing the news these past few days.  In case you didn’t hear, the Executive Office of the President agreed to restore 94 days of missing e-mails from 2003-2005.  The previous administration failed to recover over 20 million missing e-mails which will now be transferred to the National Archives for preservation and eventual release.

Regardless of your political views, I think this recent change of events is newsworthy, timely, and all too familiar.  It seems every time we turn the page in the Wall Street Journal, we hear about vicious lawsuits with astonishing facts and supporting documentation.   Most of the evidence focuses around e-mail and associated attachments – and no wonder – according to a recent survey from IDG Research, 62% percent of executives rate eDiscovery a top driver for email management strategies.

However, there is a lot more to litigation readiness than emails and attachments – but that’s a different story for a different day.

So when I hear the White House knowingly continued to use a broken system for preserving electronic records, I often wonder how many companies out there are in the same boat.  Companies who know they have a problem but are either ignoring it, wishing it will all go away, or struggling to deploy the proper controls and archiving services.  It’s not an easy problem to fix but certainly one that needs to be acknowledged and addressed.  If you type “Email archiving” into Google, you will get over 2 million hits with vendor promises to solve your e-mail management issues.  So how come it’s not universally resolved?

The fact is – it’s not that simple to fix.  In addition to having a robust effective archiving platform, companies need to manage the policies and ensure they are properly enforced.  The retention policies must be clearly defined (and agreed upon by management with approval from legal), communicated to everyone in the organization, and then accurately enforced across all e-mail servers and applications.  And then how do you handle the proliferation of Blackberries, iPhones, Instant Messaging applications, personal email accounts, and those handy SMS messages?

This is where Information Governance comes in.  Information Governance is a solution framework to manage risk (and pain) related to compliance with laws and regulations regarding the retention and disposition of business records.  The framework enables proactive and central information management with a systematic process across business functions and isolated silos of information.  This is precisely the reason Information Governance is becoming a top priority for all C-level corporate executives and including now the President of the United States.