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?