You have all heard the same old story from local to state governments wherever you live. Some major scandal takes place, an eDiscovery request is placed, and for some odd reason we find out that no email is being retained for the employees involved. Or worse yet it has been maliciously deleted and not recoverable. Some government agencies even have a policy to purge email on a routine basis.
An article from the AP was floating around today that discussed this situation. In three instances state employees were told to either routinely or deliberately delete email from their mail systems and backup tapes. The main problem is that these emails are being destroyed before they have the chance to be viewed as public record.
State governments are finding out what corporations found out long ago. Even though you might have a policy of routinely deleting email it may not protect you in all cases. Emails should be treated as public record and should be retained for a period of time. In some states guidelines are set to define what a public record is and employees are expected to determine what to save. Although a process that relies on manual classification of email lends itself to human errors and inconsistencies.
So what are government agencies to do, keep everything? In the article Joerling was worried that keeping too many records may not make it efficient for state agencies to recall email when requested. On this point I have to agree with the government activists. It is better to keep everything and store it efficiently in an email archive where it can be indexed and easily searched. With modern archiving technology there is really no excuse not to produce public data when requested.
AP article link: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/TEC_SAVING_E_MAIL?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-07-14-04-35-52
Technorati Tags:
Email Archiving, eDiscovery, Compliance, Retention, Public Record, State Agencies, Government
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