Messaging Architects Offers Its ePolicy Workshop at a Sizeable Non-profit Organization

The customer had previously purchased Messaging Architects’ M+Archive product because experience from a recent lawsuit had proved they needed a reliable way to preserve, manage and search email. However, the customer had been unable to implement the product due to a lack of a policy on email retention and destruction.

Earlier internal discussions on how to draft a policy had made little progress, and the IT department worried that nothing was in progress to make a policy come into existence. The IT department knew that it possessed no authority to impose a policy on their own. They needed a breakthrough.

The IT department scheduled Messaging Architect’s ePolicy workshop which I have been leading for over 2 years. When the workshop was announced, the IT department was able to ensure the participation of the key stakeholders: Legal and HR.

Compared to other workshops, this one was intimate, involving only a lawyer, an HR representative and two IT representatives. From the start, I engaged with the customer’s lawyer in a professional dialog about what the big issues are and what I have seen other organizations do. This led into a spirited, freeform discussion among all participants about the many places where copies of emails can reside, the challenges involved in confirming that all copies of any given email are ever destroyed, and the numerous new message types that people are using in business, including text messages and social networking.

Eventually, the customer’s lawyer admitted our discussion had changed his thinking. Electronic records behave differently from what he thought. This change of position became the foundation upon which the workshop eventually drafted a policy.

Two participants in the workshop said they wanted to hear about case examples from other enterprises and to examine the policy template I had brought. They debated which kinds of records needed to be kept for longer and which for shorter periods. They knew from experience certain records need very long retention periods.

As the day progressed, common ground began to emerge of which I kept track on a flip chart. By the end of the day, the group seemed to have direction. Using the agreed points from the flip chart, I drafted a sample policy for their review the next morning.

On day two of the workshop, the participants asked the Messaging Architects' systems engineer technical questions on how specific policy objectives could be met with M+Archive, which they already owned. Then the group reviewed the draft policy, followed by more discussion and changes.

Something surfaced in this workshop that had not surfaced before: a thorough conversation about documents on the customer’s document management system. The group decided the retention policy should be expanded to cover managed documents in addition to email.

The group believed it had reached consensus on policy. I made the changes to the draft and provided the revised policy to the customer’s lawyer. At the group's request, I also devoted some time discussing two optional sections from the ePolicy curriculum on how to implement legal holds and promote attorney confidentiality and on data security law.

As the workshop concluded, the participants expressed great satisfaction with the process and the outcome.

– Benjamin Wright
Benjamin Wright is a strategic advisor to Messaging Architects.