Seek and you shall find – maybe

THE TYPICAL user in a large organisation sends and receives about 85 e-mails every day, according to recent research conducted by analyst company Osterman Research. That equates to more than 22,000 e-mails per person, per year.

EMC Software president Dave DeWalt, meanwhile, believes that the true figure may be higher still. Meeting up with Enterprise Information at the company’s recent Momentum conference in Rome, he estimated it to be closer to 113 e-mails sent and received each day – an annual total of about 29,000 e-mails per year.

Either way, those e-mails are taking up a lot of data storage space and it’s no wonder that many of us are pretty dubious about our ability to retrieve a specific e-mail weeks, months or years after it was sent.

In this month’s issue, we speak to Graeme Low, head of information systems at law firm Mills & Reeve about how the firm is creating a comprehensive, searchable archive of all e-mails older than a year (plus any containing attachments). Also in this issue, top e-mail consultant Dr Keith Nicholson presents a practical, three-step programme for successful e-mail management that addresses the so-called ‘triple helix’ of people, policies and technology.

Of course, for most companies, the problem of data retrieval extends beyond e-mail to other forms of enterprise information, such as transactional data, financial reports, customer orders and so on. For that reason, this month’s cover issue looks at information lifecycle management, an idea that many information management professionals find intriguing in theory, but very difficult to put into practice.

As always, I hope readers take away some useful perspectives and guidance from this issue’s contents – and I look forward to hearing from you about your successes in archiving and retrieving data.

Jessica Twentyman,

Consulting editor

Features

Workshop: Securing mobile devices Free
With increased mobility comes increased information risk. What counter-measures can organisations take to protect the information held on personal digital assistants? Paul Orlowski examines the options.

Q&A: National Archives Free
It is now more than three years since the UK’s National Archives first launched its digital archive. But as David Thomas, the organisation’s head of government and technology, tells Enterprise Information, the innovation continues.

Opinion: Thinking outside the box Free
Today’s social networking sites and tools are just the beginning, argues Lynda Rathbone.

Feature: Digital asset management Free
The management of digital assets that organisations use to convey their brand image and message to the world is in a mess. It’s time to put that right, says Jessica Twentyman.

Book review: Privacy Nation Free
In hindsight, it was a glaringly obvious security risk. And ChoicePoint, one of the biggest identification and credit verification agencies in the US, should have had processes in place to protect itself. But identity thieves, because of the easy and substantial sums of money involved in their crimes, can be cunning and ingenious.

Case study: M&S Money Free
At financial services company M&S Money, part of global banking giant HSBC, the pressure was on to meet the requirements of the Basel II accord – but also to improve the general quality of the data it holds on its customers.

Regulars

Workshop: Optimising content management for intranets Free
Successful intranet content management system implementations require a focus on the end-to-end process of content management – not just content contribution. Stephen Musselwhite explains.

Last word: The information-strategy imperative Free
A recent Gartner article suggested that by 2012, companies will need to handle 30 times more data than in 2002.