ePolicy Case Study: Stakeholders Work Together to Draft Email Policy
Messaging Architects has held its ePolicy workshop in numerous, diverse organizations throughout 2009 and 2010. One such organization was a sizable state government agency, which had approximately 5000 email users. One year prior, the agency had purchased Messaging Architects' M+Archive product, but it had not implemented it beyond the pilot stage because the agency had not settled on an email retention policy. Although stakeholders within the agency had discussed policy, they had not reached consensus.
With a view to breaking the logjam, the agency’s CIO invited Messaging Architects to bring its ePolicy workshop to the agency. Believing that she had not been able to get sufficient attention from the Legal Department, the CIO hoped that the workshop – led by an outside lawyer – would motivate more engagement by Legal.
Although the workshop is normally scheduled for two days, the CIO preferred to hold the workshop over only one day. Her objective was not really to have a policy drafted by the end of the workshop. Instead, it was to break the logjam, get the stakeholders to work together, and to propel them toward final drafting of a policy.
Participants in the workshop expressed some strong, contradictory opinions. One opinion emphasized that each employee should (consistent with statewide guidelines) have responsibility to review each email, delete those that are not official records, and file the others into specified categories. Another opinion stressed that employees do not have the time and will not take the time to review emails in this way; this opinion argued for generous retention of email in an archive system, where it can be found through searching rather than through categorization.
Messaging Architects was represented in the workshop by attorney Benjamin Wright and system engineer Michael Dybala. Their primary role was to facilitate an orderly, informed discussion on e-records law, experiences in other enterprises, and the technical functions of M+Archive.
Agency stakeholders participating in the workshop included representatives from IT, Legal, Operations and Records Management.
After spirited debate, compromises emerged. The group agreed on an outline for drafting policy. At the end of the day, the workshop closed with a commitment between the IT department and the Legal Department to work together to draft that policy in an expeditious fashion.
– Benjamin Wright
Benjamin Wright is a strategic advisor to Messaging Architects.
