E-mail has become the most critical form of business communication. So why are the majority of companies failing to maximise e-mail to deliver real corporate value? How many companies have direct, searchable access to all email communication - body copy and attachment - from corporate applications such as CRM?

And why, despite the proliferation of mobile devices such as the Blackberry, most users can see only the e-mails that have arrived over the past few days - do they have no visibility of the complete email history?

In fact for most organisations e-mail is in the pain rather than gain column. From the demands of compliance regulation and corporate governance to escalating storage volumes, email management is a major, and growing, cost.

It is time to recognise that the traditional hierarchical data structure within e-mail servers is not appropriate for the volume or value of email communication. For e-mail to become a true business enabler organisations need to embrace a new model for e-mail management that not only addresses the storage challenge but also delivers complete access to this essential corporate information source.

E-mail has wrought the most fundamental transformation in business communication over the past decade. Today it is used for every financial transaction, from invoice to remittance; for sales quotes and complex contract negotiations. Yet its ubiquity, ease of use and global adoption is also its Achilles heel.

Despite increasingly punitive e-mail policies, too many organisations experience anarchic e-mail use. Duplication and multiple versions make it near impossible to retain any kind of control over what is vital business information. And while a few companies have achieved a degree of control over email attachments by using document management tools, what about the body of the e-mail?

Industry analysts estimate that 70 per cent of customer interactions are sitting inside e-mail systems, locked up in individual mail boxes. Failing to monitor, control or provide access to this essential business knowledge is fundamentally leaving organisations wide open to compliance breaches and allegations of lack of employee duty of care.

Furthermore, without real visibility of this information organisations are consistently risking serious business mistakes that can result in inadequate contracts, missed sales and lost customer opportunities. Given the reliance on email communication isn’t it time to impose some control on this crucial business tool?

The need for e-mail archiving is widely understood - as demonstrated by recent industry consolidation. However, for the majority of organisations the goal is simply to resolve the email storage problem. This is understandable given the inadequacy of existing solutions. There can be no justification for technology that forces the IT team to manage 100 per cent of e-mail when only 2 per cent changes on a daily basis. Nor for relying on users to manage their own in-boxes - a strategy resulting in haphazard deleting that undermines compliance policies and jeopardises corporate information.

However, organisations looking at e-mail archiving solely to resolve the storage problem are in danger of missing the point. Simply using archiving technology to move email data away from the inbox and into a repository may resolve the storage problem but it also locks away vital business information.

Used correctly, e-mail is a core component of business success. The e-mail archive should be treated accordingly to ensure all enterprise information is available to every user and every application across the business. To achieve this goal, e-mail needs to be stored in a fully retrievable, auditable and searchable manner. And, critically, this must be done without creating a massive storage overhead or requiring user intervention.

Underpinning this shift must be a recognition that the traditional hierarchical storage mechanism within e-mail servers is constraining access to corporate information. While undoubtedly an excellent messaging system, the e-mail server was never designed as an information store. By using a relational database e-mail management solution alongside existing mail servers, organisations can solve the storage problem and, critically, unlock vital business information.

The relational model overcomes the conflict between retaining all e-mail and escalating storage costs. By modelling e-mail in an information store that was designed for this purpose, the process becomes extremely efficient.

Once every e-mail is stored within a relational database structure, organisations finally have rapid access to this key corporate asset. By integrating the email data store with core applications, from CRM and finance to HR and ERP, and providing remote access via mobile devices, organisations have a complete enterprise information view for the first time.

With the right data model, organisations can immediately address the storage challenge without compromise, enabling the store-everything policy that is the only answer to long term compliance and corporate knowledge management. Without the right data model, organisations will continue to throw ever more resources at the storage problem without gaining any quantifiable benefit. From multiple versions of attachments to e-mail body text, information is lost to the business. This undermines every aspect of business growth, from knowledge transfer to customer development - since essential communications are lost for good.

The relational structure supports far more robust storage strategies. Single instancing of all documents removes the issue of attachment duplication and reduces storage volumes by 50 per cent. Managing only the new e-mails radically reduces the IT management overhead, while users have unlimited mail boxes, removing any excuse for non-policy e-mail deletion. Furthermore, it enables organisations to extend standard enterprise data controls - such as time and data stamping - to e-mail, delivering enterprise wide information consistency.

There is global consensus that email has changed the way business is conducted for good. Yet as organisations struggle to meet compliance objectives while controlling the costs of escalating email-fuelled storage requirements, e-mail is actually becoming a significant corporate burden. Those organisations that continue to treat e-mail as a storage overhead rather than information asset will only see the problem escalate - the model is simply not sustainable.

By integrating the e-mail archive solution into the core infrastructure organisations can not only resolve compliance requirements and reduce the storage overhead but, more importantly, unleash invaluable corporate information to the business to deliver quantifiable benefit.

BIOS, May 12, 06 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Business