Editorial
E-Mail Management: A Killer App For Imaging Vendors
E-mail archiving is rapidly becoming one of the hottest topics in the document management world. In the time leading up to this month’s AIIM show in Philadelphia, we’ve seen quite a few announcements touting new applications in this area. There seems to be no argument that both the volume and value of business information exchanged by e-mail continues to increase. However, despite the fact that this trend wasn’t discovered yesterday, most applications don’t effectively address what we view as the heart of the problem. That is the selective storage and retention of e-mail messages.
ZyLab, a Netherlands-based document imaging software developer, is one vendor that has recently announced a new e-mail archiving application. Dr. Johannes Scholtes, president of ZyLab North America, likes to call systems that indiscriminately archive all messages “liability vaults.” “In Europe, this type of ‘save everything’ approach is considered a violation of privacy,” Scholtes told DIR. “In the U.S., however, a lot of companies are doing full-blown archiving to meet regulatory requirements. Companies that have international businesses are really confused.”
In defense of most current applications, they were developed initially for saving storage space. They offer features like the elimination of duplicate messages and attachments and the ability to off-load older messages to less expensive types of media. While this may offer a tremendous cost justification, trying to leverage these applications to meet legal requirements is not very efficient.
To this point, Enron and Arthur Andersen actually got in trouble for e-mail that was not properly deleted when it should have been. Randy Kahn, in his industry-wide best seller Information Nation, tells the tale of a company named Fluror Daniel that faced $6 million in discovery fees because it had not properly recycled back-up tapes containing e-mail files. Even technology maestro himself Bill Gates got into trouble during the Microsoft vs. Netscape trial because of incriminating e-mails that could/should have been deleted.
Different Flavors Of E-Mail
In our opinion, there is one factor that makes effective e-mail management so difficult. That is that e-mail is often used as a replacement for phone conversation, probably more often than it is used as a replacement for fax or paper communication. As a result, there needs to be a separation between casual and formal e-mail. After all, almost nobody (excepting Dick Nixon, Howard Hughes, a few others) archives their phone conversations—for good reason. If everything you said on the phone were kept in a searchable database, wouldn’t you be in a lot of trouble?
Recently, document management vendors have been advertising their systems’ abilities to manage e-mail files as records. Both ZyLab and Open Text recently made announcements in relation to this. Under these scenarios, end users are typically required to manually classify each e-mail message they want to archive. After that, records management retention policies can be automatically applied.
The problem with this approach is that it puts the onus on end users to make decisions about their e-mails. When it comes to compliance with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, which are designed to put responsibility in the hands of CEOs, this approach might not wash. Also, it would presumably require quite a bit of education and supervision to be executed successfully.
Scholtes has a proposal which he considers the next best thing—having a compliance officer sort through messages on the e-mail server and decide what needs to be saved and what doesn’t. He dismissed the potential of being able to achieve classification automatically with some sort of intelligent document recognition technology.
“We do a lot of text mining and classification for our customers in the intelligence community,” he told DIR. (ZyLab lists the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and all branches of the U.S. military on its customer list.) “Working with our partners and using the most advanced techniques available, we’re only able to achieve 80% precision in recall on files that have been classified automatically. In a compliance application, you need 100% precision.”
We can’t argue with that assessment. We will, however, say that being able to automatically classify 80% of e-mails, beats 0% auto-classification. Isn’t there some cost savings that can be gained by only having to manually classify 20%? This is the type of compromise that forms processing vendors have learned to work with over the years. It could also prove effective in implementing e-mail archiving.
Imaging Vendors Should Take The Lead
From what we understand, experienced document imaging players like IBM and Kofax are already working on auto-classification techniques for e-mail archiving. Captiva’s vision for its Digital Mailroom also includes e-mail. Yes, because of their experience in dealing with large amounts of unstructured data, document imaging vendors are the perfect businesses to solve e-mail archiving problems. And, as we mentioned, many already offer the records management functionality so important for managing files after they’ve been archived.
“Last year, everybody was asking about e-mail management; however, they were coming up with excuses not to buy,” Scholtes told DIR. “Now we have increased our options and people are starting to buy. However, we do not sell e-mail management as a standalone application. We treat e-mail as a record, just like any other document.”
Yes, as we’ve said before in this publication, it’s our opinion that there is tremendous opportunity in e-mail archiving—in both small and large businesses alike. And we are still waiting for a killer app. We believe this application will be designed to preserve the informality and ease-of-use of e-mail applications, while effectively applying regulatory controls where needed. It may seem like a Holy Grail right now, but so did invoice processing a few years back.
For more information: http://www.zylab.com |
