10 reasons to tackle corporate email – reason 5
Compliance. Compliance. Compliance.
When it really comes down to it, how much do you know about the conversations your people are having on email? Long before the highly visible ‘wish I hadn’t said that’ contributions on Facebook, Twitter and numerous other social networking sites, all manner of jokes, personal conversations and transactions were humming back and forth on email.
And for a significant number of people in most organisations, they still are.
Generally organisations have an acceptable use policy, and recognise that tools such as the phone and email will be used for personal matters at some stage. For many people and organisations, email is still the primary tool for transactional interchanges.
But because so many of those email conversations are not generally visible to the world at large, organisations don’t appear to attach the same risk profile to them as we are seeing with employee contributions on social networking sites (although emails can still go viral – here’s a recent example). Maybe that’s because the fallout to brand and reputation is so visibly dramatic with social networking. And perhaps because the email genie is already long out of the bottle.
Leaving aside the knowledge implications of all that information wallowing in email boxes there may also be compliance reasons to investigate the toolset your organisation is using.
Consider this. Your organisation contracts with customers or suppliers. The contract is captured in a word or pdf document. It is usually filed on a server. And then everyone gets on with the business of working under that contract.
The people involved may well email back and forth on many aspects of the contract – interpretation, delivery, terms, service levels. That people understand their limits of authority is critical (that is, what they are entitled to offer or agree to on behalf of the company), and the potential to state something in the email that will alter the terms of the contract and bind the company is high.
Representations will bind an organisation even when an email has been deleted. We’re talking here about emails, but document management protocols – or lack thereof – in a company can cause grief for a very long time, as evidenced by the Rolah McCabe case.
For many organisations, document management systems that link all transactions or conversations with the contract, or primary agreement, are essential. It provides both visibility of the entire transaction, over time, with an audit capability to ensure compliance. Toolsets won’t solve a compliance issue, but as part of a solution they will dramatically increase the visibility of the process.