10 reasons to tackle corporate email – reason 2
So what does your organisation do with corporate email archives when a person leaves?
In the past two days we’ve had online conversations with two people, both of whom have mentioned efforts they’ve taken to set boundaries around the time spent on email.
We think these kinds of initiatives recognise how pervasive a tool email is. We actually use it to get work done. So as we discussed in our last post, email boxes become quite a repository of information, knowledge and practical know-how.
You might argue that when a person leaves an organisation, much organisational learning goes with them. But there is probably a lot left behind in, you guessed it, emails.
We haven’t heard of too many organisations that do much more than hang onto the archive for a while (depending on their information retention policy) and then finally offload it. But we suspect there is a lot of useful information that is lost when that happens.
So what’s the answer? Trawl through email boxes to sift out the useful information? No one has the time or the resources to do that. Implement a compliance program to manage and review what is contained in email? That can be tackled as part of a document management program but it’s a big job.
I watched with interest a couple of years back as Luis Suaraz over at elsua.net (a knowledge management blog) undertook to reduce his daily use of email by using social networking tools. He summarised how he did that recently on cio.com.
He may work in a different role to many of those in your organisation, but the principles apply no matter what your industry.