In their February 2009 email blog for Travis County, Texas, written by Steven Broberg and Shawn Malone, as government records managers for Travis County, they were debating how best to create an email policy which would support over 4000 end users without adding more confusion about state directives and standards on records retention policies. They proposed three general directions for their email retention policy and asked readers for their feedback.

As I have seen in many enterprises, and as the authors have also noted in their blog, there is always resistance to change that will be encountered anytime new ideas are proposed especially in large enterprises where business processes that are not broken will be defended as not needing to change.

One of their options, “Maintaining the Status Quo”, offered the least resistance by end users to accept as a general direction for records management. And it was also, of course, the least costly. If end users are at the front end of this direction – and also the endorsers – then the back end opponents included: security specialists, lawyers, vendors, NARA, TSLAC, etc.

With option one it is very unlikely that the company could maintain that mode as sooner or later there would be a need for email records that would be the subject of electronic discovery procedures and legal litigation. “Maintaining the Status Quo”, in my opinion, is not a viable option but merely one to list as a possible, though not probable, general email retention direction.

Their second option was to allow every employee using email to be their own records keeper. This direction would include publishing a records management set of rules and guidelines that all email users would have to adhere to. And to assist the employees in staying within the guidelines of a company’s record management policy the IT department would provide tools and training. Continue reading E-Discovery Record Keeping