Managing e-mail for the benefit of better knowledge
Gayle Evans Head of Knowledge & Information
Management
National Museum Wales
Tame it or loose it !
Trusted information
What do these two men have in common?
Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 – 1913)Evolution through natural selection
Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)
I have called this principle, by whicheach slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.
—Charles Darwin from "The Origin of Species"
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 – 1913)
But it was Russel Wallace who in Feb. 1858 wrote ‘On the tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the original type’ which ge sent to Darwin
July 1958 – Wallace and Darwin present at the Linnaean Society
Almost forgotten man of science
Remembered – why?
Traceable written communication
Knowledge drain
Business and the academic worlds are based on facts and communication
The lack of either can be devastating The tools that enable the creation and
transmission of knowledge are single largest growing technology in the world today
But the controls to manage and preserve this knowledge are just beginning
E-mail – fantastic growth
University of Washington– 60,000 active accounts– 500,000 e-mail messages per day (sent &
received)– 1,083 per minute– Growing at a rate of 25 % / year – by 2010 will top
1 million /day– E-mail – most heavily used application
E-mail - fact
541 million workers worldwide rely on e-mail Worldwide – + 60 billion messages sent/ day More that half are spam Others maybe infected with viruses, worms,
spyware or illegal content
Yet this is the single most relied upon form of communication
Are we heading for a e-disaster
Knowledge and the Extinction Age
Interval of abrupt change in Earth’s history
End of the Cretaceous (K) period & opened the Tertiary (T) period
Extinction of over 95% of living things
KT boundary
E-mail – Essential not Easy
Number 1 form of business communication Rated as the tool business users rely on the
most Messaging server considered critical
application 50% business – mission-critical system Yet still it is not taken seriously
E-mail – adhoc or managed
Structured vs. unstructured information Create, distribute, file and destroy Manage risk Compliance with regulations Log access Authenticity (flight data recorder) Storage (central or personal drives)
E-mail – 7 key issues
Easy tool Valuable asset Recognised record Need to be accessible Staff leave – information should stay Storage strain Underpins an effective organisation Overload
Essential-mail
Must consider
– Retention, disposal and accessibility– Storage and migration– Security - (confidentiality, integrity and availability)– Ownership– Legal / regulatory requirements– Corporate systems / applications
Should UK be nervous?
Last year – 5 Wall Street brokerages paid $8.25 million in fines for discarding e-mails related to customer transactions
In July, a US court found that UBS Warburg was responsible for paying as much as $300,000 to restore e-mails required for a gender discrimination case
Should the academics be concerned?
Without processes in place – there will be significant potential for loss of knowledge from the work of today’s scholars’ and to our collective memory.
Without preserved knowledge – we might forget about the contributions of Wallace and Tyndall.
Preventing the drain
Understand the importance of the information and its use
Develop & implement a Knowledge Management Strategy
Implement effective management Plan and implement policies and procedures Never underestimate the simple e-mail
Use e-mail selectively
E-mail or not to e-mail – that is the question
Thank you!
Thoughts, observations or questions?