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: E-mail management Free
Top e-mail consultant Dr. Keith Nicholson presents a practical three-step programme for successful e-mail management.

Workshop: Social networking Free
Wikis are all the rage, with many companies implementing wiki software to help staff better share their knowledge and information. However, like all implementations, there is a right way – and a wrong way – to go about it. By Mark Choate

Trendtracker: Building Web 2.0 Free
Web 2.0 is the term widely used to describe the new wave of interactive web applications – and Ajax is the key technology behind it.

Cover story: The ILM Imperative Free
Smart use of the data storage infrastructure is helping many companies tackle data management and compliance burdens – but an information lifecycle management strategy requires a lot of upfront effort. By Jessica Twentyman

Case study: Norwich Union Free
Who owns the intranet? Who decides what can – and can’t – be published? Four years ago, insurer Norwich Union started to tackle the issue of intranet governance in its life assurance business. Today, governance is being tackled enterprise-wide.

Regulars

Thought leader: Enterprise 2.0 Free
More and more organisations are now experimenting with the use of lightweight social tools to improve internal communications and knowledge sharing – a phenomenon some are calling ‘enterprise 2.0’. By Lee Bryant.

Last word: The trouble with portal dashboards… Free
Enterprise portals are supposed to make systems more accessible to real, live humans. But portal technology adopters today face several usability challenges, including complicated dashboard interfaces. By Janus Boye.

Q&A: Mills & Reeve Free
Graeme Low, head of information systems at law firm Mills & Reeve, is on a mission to bring rocketing e-mail volumes under control. He tells Enterprise Information how the implementation of an archiving system may reduce mailbox storage requirements by more than 50 per cent.

Book review: Information Usage Behavior Free
THE PROBLEM with information is that, today, there is far too much of it – more than anyone can comprehend, let alone absorb and begin to understand. And that is quite clear from the opening chapters of Information Usage Behavior, which starts by taking us breathlessly through the last 50,000 or so years of human development, culminating in the information overload we suffer from today, courtesy of the internet.