One of my very first blog posts on this site was Email Is For Losers. I wrote then about the horrendous data management challenges associated with email and the need to find an alternative. Other forms of messaging certainly are giving email some competition, but by and large email is still the workhorse of all corporate communications. The management issues I discussed then are still a problem.
Of course, there are also security issues associated with email (and to be fair, all other types of office communications) which relate to my point about record management. I was interviewed on this topic in a recent Vancouver Sun article, E-mail mistakes breaching confidentiality at the click of a button. The story came after a Coast Capital Savings employee used the wrong distribution list when sending an e-mail. The information of more than 450 insurance clients was sent to 75 local media outlets. My two cents are below:
Before e-mail, there were checks in place, where documents were reviewed before being sent. The same should be true with e-mails — there should be a vetting process, Vincalek said.
“Right now with e-mail you have no work flow, you have no process,” he said.
Vincalek doesn’t blame the sender, because e-mail makes that type of mistake easy.
“How many organizations can say with a straight face that can never happen in our organization?” he asked.
Vaclav Vincalek August 25th, 2009 10:00:00 AM