Booth bunny
Once in a while every articulate consultant gets to play booth bunny at some technical show. So, having donned a jacket and tie, rather than the fur-trimmed swimsuit, The Portable Consultant was happy to take his turn describing his client’s services to their customers. During a break in the huge lines of people hungry to hear about infrastructure solutions design (“Servers R Us”, basically -all manner of hosting), I took the time to visit our booth neighbours who were presenting their Record and Document Management Systems pilot project.

Now the organization in question is large. Several divisions have the size and technical expertise to justify large initiatives within their own jurisdiction. That being said, I have always been something of a centralist with regard to IT, believing that enterprise-wide strategic solutions are preferable to tactical point solutions in several areas – document and records management being two of them, email being yet another.

So I was interested to learn that this particular ECM pilot project was apparently taking place with some involvement, or at least monitoring, from a central central strategic IT initiatives group. As I learned more, however, it was somewhat distressing to hear that the project would provide its own email archiving component and so the new system would, in fact, result in a de facto change in the enterprise’s existing email archiving abilities.

The quick answer
When I asked whether email would be treated as “business records” I was told they would. When I asked whether the new system would archive email for the business division in question I was told it would. When I asked whether the existing enterprise mail archive would continue to retain copies of mail archived information the proposed system the response was “Yes, if someone were to configure it that way.”

So it appears we have a business unit of this large enterprise making decisions that appear to lie outside their purview, namely the realm of the enterprise’s email archiving policy. It would take considerable knowledge and effort for one of the users to make the configurations necessary to restore the original functionality of the enterprise email archiving function once the division’s new record and document management system had been installed. In short, this one initiative has removed the word “Enterprise” from a portion of ECM policy.

Local versus central or indisputable mandate?
Some may see this as the old battle between the central IT folks and those in the business units. My view is that the ‘E’ in ECM stands for ‘enterprise’ and that a service like email archiving that is clearly within the enterprise mandate should not be altered at the departmental level except to enhance or expand. If this division’s email is no longer archived by the central service then the essential meaning of ‘enterprise’ email will have been lost.

Cheers,
-pmh