Is it possible to manage e-mail?

At the September meeting of the London Group of the Records Management Society,  I used Open Space Technology to facilitate a meeting set up to adress the following question:

• is e-mail a problem for our organisations? if so what are the solutions?

Open space technology (OST) is a method of conducting events that enables those attending the event to set the agenda at the start of the meeting. Own Harrison was moved to develop OST as a result of his experiences at conferences.  He would invariably find the coffee breaks more useful than the conference sessions.  He concluded that this was because at a coffee break you talk about the issues that matter to you, ask the questions that interest you, and if you find yourself in a conversation where you are neither contributing or learning anything, you politely melt away, and start, or join, a different conversation.

A key aspect of OST is that anyone who cares about an issue can get it onto the agenda for discussion, just so long as they care about it enough to announce it to the group and to take responsibility for making sure the discussion happens.  Those people who haven't proposed an issue can join any discussion they like and can leave a group and move to another discussion whenever they like.

We met at the City Marketing Suite, in the Guildhall. It was an evening meeting, kicking off at 6:30pm  after sandwiches and coffee.   We had a nice large room, which had on one side a set of sliding doors leading to the remains of a Roman ampitheatre, and on the other a reception room with a huge, interactive scale model of the buildings of the City of London.

I set up the main room as a large circle, for the expected 30 people.  In the centre of the circle was some chubby markers, and some big blank pieces of paper (sheets of flipchart paper torn in half). 

At the start of the meeting I invited anyone who had an issue related to the management of e-mails that they wanted to explore, to come into the centre of the circle, write the issue down on one of the big pieces of paper, and then stand up and announce it to the group.

There was an uncomfortable but expectant silence for about a minute (it felt like longer!).  Eventually someone stood up (thank you Fiona).  We had our first issue:

• Can we expect users to classify e-mails so that they can be managed according to records management theory?

Some other issues followed in a steady stream:

• Is it the people who use e-mail that are the problem?
• If saving e-mails to a records folder is a long winded process, then should we still tell users to do it?'
• Are e-mails corporate records?
• If even deleted e-mails are discoverable under Freedom of Information, then are all e-mails records?

Silence.  That seemed to be it.  No hold on, there is one more:

• Should we be encouraging our colleagues to use alternative methods of communication other than e-mail?

Those who raised the issues stood holding their half sheet of paper.  Everyone else chose which issue interested them most, and the groups that formed moved off to begin their discussions.

I sat outside the discussions for a while. Owen Harrison saw the role of the facilitaor in Open Space Technology as simply being to explain the principles, get the ball rolling and then keep out the way.  You may have a vague use in picking up rubbish, and answering housekeeping questions about the location of toilets, water coolers etc..

So there I sat.  No-one seemed to need anything.  On my left hand was the 'long winded process ' discussion, debating the best way of getting an e-mail from an in-box to a records folder on a shared drive (they concluded that the 'save as' option was better than 'drag and drop' because with drag and drop you might inadvertently drop the e-mail into the wrong folder).  On my other side I could hear the 'alternative methods of communication' discussion talking about the over use of e-mail, and how people have forgotten how to pick up a phone.

I couldn't maintain my aloofness any longer.  I took a wander into the next room, most of which was taken up with the architectural model.  A large discussion had formed from the merger of ' are any e-mails records?'  with 'are all e-mails records?'.  They were at the back of the room, squidged in betwen the wall and the model.  Most standing, some sitting on a bench jutting from the wall.

A guy from a local authority was explaining their plan to keep all e-mails for ever in an e-mail archiving system.

'But what about Data Protection?'

'We will tell users to tick a box if it contains personal information and those e-mails will be deleted after a retention period.'

The group were uneasy,but none of us could come up with a really convincing reason why this couldn't or shouldn't be done.

The discussion swelled as people drifted towards us from other groups. Next to us in the main room 'can we expect users to classify e-mails?' was getting large too. The long winded process discussion must have finished: some of those people were standing next to me now.  The 'alternative methods of communication' discussion was still going strong, a small group isolated in the corner of the main room. 

All of a sudden the 'can we expect users to classify e-mails?' discussion splits like a cloud burst. Its twenty to eight. Time to call everyone back into the big circle.

''So what has come out of this evening'' I ask when everyone is settled in their chairs.  It was like lighting touch paper.  Someone mentioned the local authority's plan to keep all e-mails for ever. A horrified colleague painted a picture of his past month spent dealing with a basement store where twenty years worth of records had been left to go mouldy.

''If we keep all our e-mails we are just building up another huge mess that someone else will have to clean up in the future.''

'' Except that it won't go mouldy''

''And you can get a search engine to go through the e-mails, but they haven't yet invented a search engine that will go round a mouldy records store.''

The gloves were well and truly off, contributions were coming thick and fast, it was 8 o'clock, the advertised finish time.  I pointed the time out to the group, it made no difference, the discussion was still going strong:

''keeping everything for ever isn't records management''

Someone puts their coat on, it emboldens me.  I thank everyone for their time, and we drift off into the pouring rain outside.

As I walked through an out-of-hours City made even more deserted than usual by the rain I thought about the evening's discussions.  We as a proffession seem to have a choice.  We know what good record keeping practice is.  In this electronic age it is even harder to get people to understand and follow that practice than it was in the paper age.  Do we persist in our endeavour to get that practice followed, or do we look for alternatives? And if we look for alternatives have we ceased to practise records management?