FINDING THE HIDDEN VALUE IN E-MAIL

by Arun Majumdar, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

E-mail analytics and management systems are rising to the frontier of high-demand BI tools. E-mail management systems can perform analyses to identify relationships across the business processes, market segments, and root causes for change in the business. Meanwhile, in the BI context, e-mail analytics help determine possible outcomes for changes in the existing business environment where other methods may fail.

There is great risk in assuming that business communications -- in particular, e-mail -- are running smoothly. Companies routinely miss out on numerous opportunities to increase cash flow, profitability, and security and, worse, to stave off litigation. This occurs because all of an organization's business processes are essentially intertwined and determined by communications among people, which today are borne by e-mail and instant messaging.

E-mail includes not only interoffice and third-party messages but also attached files, such as plain text files, documents, drafts, copies of third-party documents (whether under nondisclosure or not), scanned copies of papers (e.g., PDF files), and notes of meetings or conversations from PDA messages and voice-to-text systems. From the intelligence perspective, this is both a business asset as well as a liability.

Substantial value is gained from quality implementations of e-mail management systems because they can protect an organization from litigation by providing an internal lens into BI. If there is a collaboration and synthesis of information in an organization, e-mail can provide a more complete understanding. In the context of customer relationship management (CRM), e-mail can provide BI by giving an organization enhanced customer intelligence, forecasting, and customer service. Using business processes and technologies, such as sales automation, marketing automation, and service automation, e-mail can improve the efficiency and accuracy of day-to-day CRM operations. An enterprise can serve its customers more quickly and efficiently when it uses an intelligent e-mail management system while also safeguarding against inadvertent impropriety that could lead to litigation.

As for liabilities, the most obvious are the lawsuits that have ensued from e-mails, public exposure of e-mail communications, and legal search and analysis of e-mails by law enforcement. E-mails also can serve as early warning signs, indicating tension in business relationships or interpersonal relationships, which can provide intelligence to HR to stave off the consequences of vengeful employees.

Few CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs -- in the US, at least -- have the time to understand the nitty-gritty details of the numerous SEC regulations, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and other regulations. This may put a company at significant risk, perhaps even on the path toward bankruptcy. E-mail management systems, if properly selected through an understanding of the strategic requirements and benefits to BI from the legal perspective, can make life simple for top-end management to go about its real business instead of moonlighting as lawyers and increasing risk by refusing to hire qualified legal help.

The pervasive and duplicated nature of e-mail (my "sent" box holds a copy of the e-mail sent to your inbox) and its widespread accessibility on disks, servers, networks, backup tapes, CD/DVD-ROMs, hard drives, and PDAs make tracking, analyzing, and management challenging without the proper tools.

In selecting an e-mail management system, the following questions may come to mind:

• What e-mail-based information is discoverable under the law?
• What protections are available to a producing party?
• What kinds of risk does e-mail create?
• What can be done (properly) to mitigate risk?
• What can be done to prevent litigation and to maintain corporate governance and policies?
• What is the spectrum of business value that can be gained from e-mail?
• Which checklists are available in selecting an e-mail management system?
• What kinds of BI reside in e-mail to mitigate risk but increase profit?
• Which enterprise integration issues should be considered in optimizing the BI value of an e-mail management system?

The fundamental business value of e-mail is based on organizational productivity and reduced costs. The productivity improvements are a result of the reduction of business travel and out-of-office presentations, which instead can be done using e-mail and attachments. Cost savings are based on a reduction of all costs associated with travel and the reduced cost of direct customer interaction by using e-mail.

Despite e-mail's value in terms of productivity and cost reduction, however, corporations are exposed to operational risks and reduced deliverable quality when BI is not consistently applied to monitor, analyze, and understand e-mail content. E-mail enables the appropriate number of people to participate in an event by eliminating the organizational barriers of distance or structure.

As a result of new legislation in place, e-mail is a legal construct. E-mail therefore is a legal and binding trace of the communications, intents, contracts, and commitments among people; and as a result, an organization is liable for the content of messages sent from its e-mail systems. So it is crucial that CIOs, CFOs, and CEOs quickly gain knowledge about the status, usage, and challenges of e-mail management in their organizations via a methodical and stepwise checklist of key concerns.

As corporations become flatter, leaner, and more agile, their growing information requirements magnify the pressing need for sharing and disseminating information across organizational boundaries. E-mail naturally fills this role, but internal and external competitive pressures require new time-constrained, controlled, and risk-reduced e-mail responses. As a result, more emphasis is placed on the strategic value of e-mail management systems; but unfortunately, few companies have even basic e-mail policies in place in terms of risk management, strategic-value analysis, business-process optimization, workflow optimization, and distributed mobile management.

-- Arun Majumdar, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium