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Email and Corporate Governance
Email is the most widely used business communications tool and is responsible for the majority of exchanges by employees, both internally and externally. It is the interactions between individuals that comprise much of a company's business records, consequently the records kept of the day to day business activities are more detailed than ever. This data can be valuable to businesses if managed well, but if not it can be their undoing.
Key Findings

  • IT managers of European enterprises are concerned about far more than just compliance when it comes to handling the issues that govern their businesses
    When asked about the drivers behind good corporate governance, positive ones like protection of brand name, customer confidence, productivity and competitive advantage all figured as highly as negative ones, like avoiding fines, litigation and regulatory compliance.
  • They also recognise that the right IT infrastructure and processes can help them achieve these goals and cover most of the demands of regulatory compliance at the same time
    Only 13% felt they needed a separate IT solution for each regulatory area, the remainder believing that only slight modifications were required as new regulations came into force.
  • The core demand on IT departments to enable good corporate governance is to keep the right information and to be able to retrieve it when required
    The volume of data stored these days by enterprises is huge, over 90% measuring it in terabytes. For 75% this data goes back 5 years or more. Knowing what data can be safely deleted and when, is going to make long term IT management simpler.
  • Today email is by far the most important record of employee communications that businesses are storing
    38% of those who were able to make an estimate said email was already over 25% of all data stored, but 90% said this had been increasing and expected it to continue doing so. More importantly, for both internal and external communications, email now represents over 60% of the person to person communications made by employees of European enterprises.
  • This increasing reliance on email has benefits for businesses as well as providing challenges
    Email is the only truly threaded communications tool, recording all of what was said, by who, when and who else was made aware. This is a lawyer's dream both in attack and defence.
  • Businesses need two levels of control to help manage email
    Email that is never accepted into the business is not a legal entity; the same is true of email that is never sent. Email filtering can ensure that the ones that get stored are relevant to the business and conform to predefined rules.
  • Rules need to be set about what email is stored and for how long
    Email communications vary in importance. Many can be safely deleted after a set period of time, but others need to be kept for longer if they are from a particular department or individual. This will vary across organisations and countries.
  • As part of a well managed IT infrastructure, good practice regarding email will ensure businesses are in a good position to meet their objectives around good corporate governance
    Today few IT managers claim to be fully in control of their ability to meet the demands of corporate governance, most are still working it out, which is not a problem as long as they keep heading in the right direction. A small minority remain complacent and some of these should be worried if the authorities come knocking at their door. On the whole Europe plc has things under control, but could do better