"The White House Office of Administration is not required to turn over records about a trove of possibly missing e-mails..." Click the link below to read CNN's article about the ruling: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/16/wh.emails/index.html
NEED A REMINDER ABOUT RECORDS/INFORMATION SECURITY?
NASCIO (Representing Chief Information Officers of the States) is reminding us that securing government in a digital world must be a priority. Visit NASCIO's website at the link below to view the 9 minute video reminder. http://www.nascio.org/committees/security/AT-RISK-Video.cfm
"PRIA RELEASES MICROFILM BEST PRACTICES WHITE PAPER"
"The Property Records Industry Association (PRIA) membership and board approved a "best practices" White Paper produced by the Archival, Backup and Disaster Recovery Committee at the organization's recent Annual Conference." Press release can be found under the following link: http://www.armautah.org/documents/MicrofilmBestPracticesWhitepaper-approved.pdf
"INSIDE THE RECORDS ROOM" TALK SHOW
Ray Davis, Vice President of the Liberty Bell Chapter of ARMA will be hosting an internet/radio talk show dedicated to records management. This talk show is for the records management professional looking for solutions to the challenges they are facing in today's environment. Listeners can log on to www.insidetherecordsroom.com and listen to the broadcast. Participation and feedback is encouraged. The first show aired Tuesday, December 4, 2007 at 8pm EST.
Email has become the business communication mode of choice. In a recent survey by IMERGE Consulting, more than 60% of information technology (IT) and business professionals named email as the most critical enterprise application, well above the next choice, database transaction processing (36%). In addition to the fantastic business benefits of email, it has become an overwhelming task to manage. Things stated in the heat of battle have come back to bite managers in compliance, governance and litigation proceedings. No one is immune: Executives in business, the media and government have been heavily fined and even jailed for what they have written in email messages. Managing email records has become pivotal to supporting compliance, governance and litigation efforts and this poses new challenges for today's records managers. Managing email messages and attachments, and the potentially damaging content they contain, means that records managers must educate themselves on electronic records issues and especially those that are related to email. There are groups of vendors that provide electronic record management (ERM) software and there is a whole different group that provides EMM and email archiving software. Some have fundamental ERM capabilities built in, but most don't, so there are integration issues that arise. Some provide hosted archiving services, some are in-house solutions and some EMM providers offer both choices. Key questions loom: Are all email messages a record? Can email messages be sent confidentially with no record? Should the file plan for email be based on the age of the message or its content? Records managers are going to be expected to know the answer to these types of questions. This starts with an electronic communications policy. Policies must be formed and new technologies must be deployed to manage email content before it enters or leaves an organization and renders it out of compliance with regulations or governance policies. Most organizations have an e-policy, but it is often not complete or up-to-date and comprehensive to include new communication modes like blogs, wikis and RSS newsfeeds. Regulatory requirements dictate that email messages and their attachments be preserved for significant periods of time, usually five to seven years. This varies somewhat by state and by industry. Email management and archiving software capabilities not only save these electronic messages, but also provide the ability to search and retrieve messages and attachments based on their content for use in compliance, governance or litigation (discovery) efforts. Search capabilities range from very basic searches for key words to searching for phrases and even words and phrases that use synonyms by employing a built-in thesaurus capability. Specialized fields such as medicine, chemistry and law require that industry-specific definitions are recognized by using a dictionary and thesaurus of vertical market-specific terms. In addition to basic search and retrieval capabilities, these functions within email archiving software help organizations comply with broad regulatory demands by: 1) preserving the original message format on a storage medium that is unalterable; and, 2) calculating the proper length of time for saving different types of messages, based on their date of creation, department or user and often the content within the messages. Archiving email messages and attachments, Instant Messages (IMs) and collaborative communications (also known as groupware) simply preserves these e-communications, but does not, by itself, aid in the enforcement of corporate governance policies or federal regulations. That is where more sophisticated email management software, which can stop wrongful e-communications from entering, exiting or being circulated through the organization, comes in to play. Most everyone is familiar with spam filters that stop unwanted email from entering the organization. But email management software can actually monitor and quarantine suspect messages for review before they leave or circulate through the organization and possibly cause a violation in governance or regulatory requirements. This active monitoring of outbound email is a growing trend and is called Outbound Content Compliance (OCC). Using OCC capabilities, firms set up their list of watch words, phrases and recipients to ensure that nothing leaves the bounds of the organization that could potentially cause a violation. These watchwords and definitions are not only industry-specific, but also they must be customized to be organization specific, based on established corporate governance policies. Today's records managers can gain a career edge by keeping up-to-date on these and other issues related to managing the electronic records of email messages. For more information on email policy formulation and email management software, see the newly-released Management Primer on the topic at: http://www.imergeconsult.com/news.php Robert Smallwood is a Partner with IMERGE Consulting specializing in email management topics. He is he author of over 100 articles on Information Technology topics and the upcoming book, Taming the Email Tiger. He may be reached at 504-324-2340 or robert.smallwood@imergeconsult.com