ePolicy Workshop Attracts Policy Stakeholders in the Enterprise
Setting an e-mail retention policy is hard work. Rarely in a larger
enterprise does any single manager or any single department have the
full expertise or authority to establish all of the policy. Good policy
development requires input and deliberation from many stakeholders,
such as the legal department, the IT department, the HR department, the
audit department, the risk manager, the records department, and others.
Each of these stakeholders will see the topic with a different set of risks and benefits in mind.
All of these various stakeholders are busy with other tasks. To induce them to focus on email records policy is not easy. Email raises difficult issues that didn't apply to old paper records.
As the legal department knows, email is the primary topic of the booming field of litigation known as eDiscovery. In a lawsuit, eDiscovery can be expensive if records are not well-maintained. And a lack of records can play to your disadvantage in the way of court penalties or lack of evidence to support your side of the case.
The HR and internal audit departments will point out that email has also become central to internal control, regulatory compliance and employee supervision.
Improper retention of email can yield a waste of resources. IT will want to weigh in on the cost of data storage, including the cost of technology and the cost of management. Data security must be considered as well.
In a typical enterprise such as a corporation or a government agency, none of the stakeholders has the clout to make all of the other stakeholders come to the table to examine these issues and to craft a policy. This is where our electronic records policy workshop comes in. When someone like the CIO announces that our workshop will be held in-house, the many stakeholders are motivated to make room on their calendars. The workshop brings quality, up-to-date education into the enterprise, and provides a professionally-led format for analyzing the issues and coming to consensus.
Time and again our customers have told us that the convening of the workshop was critical to their email policy development. The workshop caused the players, for the first time, to sit down long enough to hash out the components of policy. The workshop normally concludes with agreement on the basic outline of policy, with appropriate understanding on how the exact policy language will be drafted and presented to upper management for final approval.
– Benjamin Wright
Benjamin Wright is a strategic advisor to Messaging Architects.
