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AIIM 1996 Document Management Summit

Electronic Mail in the Document Management World

by Tom Worthington, President of the Australian Computer Society

1:45pm, Tuesday 29 October 1996, Canberra

Announcement & Summary

Tom Worthington Tom Worthington will give an update on a three month project on the future of the organisation in the on-line environment. This follows from his work in on-line policy development and implementation for the Federal Government and will include with the Presidents of the world's computer societies, meeting in the UK on global electronic operations in November. Tom will outline a vision for the future where e-mail is the basic means of communication and details the challenges this raises for document management.

About the speaker

Tom Worthington is current National President of the Australian Computer Society. Away from the ACS Tom is Deputy Director, Information management Planning, Australian Department of Defence. Tom is co-author of the ACS InfoBahn Policy, the Defence Representative on the Commonwealth Group, and one of the authors of the new Architecture For Access To Government Information.

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For conference details, e-mail: pearcejohn@bhp.com.au or ph (02) 92621990 or fax (02) 92621858

Draft of 27 October 1996: The content of this talk will be developed here. Suggestions and comments welcome: tom.worthington@tomw.net.au

Contents

Introduction

Electronic mail is the poor cousin of the electronic document world, but deserves most attention. The way the world will be run in 1997 is by plain text e-mail. We therefore need to make sure we have ways to effectively create, transmit, store and find e-mail messages. An investment in improving simple message handling will pay higher dividends and be much simpler to implement than multimedia document systems.

Not sinking under a flood of e-mail

In the next few months the bulk of Australian business is going to convert from doing business by meeting, phone and fax to doing business on the 'net. I can tell you what its like, because that is where I do most of my business now and have been for the last year or so.

While animated graphics, sound and on-line video look very appealing, the bulk of the work is done with very plain text e-mail messages. These replace the bulk of telephone calls, faxes and meetings.

Many people worry about junk e-mail and being overwhelmed by the volume of messages. In practice these are not the problem. Junk e-mail is far easier to deal with than junk telephone calls or junk paper mail. You can send the sender a message asking not to send you the stuff and if they persist, put them on your "kill" list (to delete their messages before you see them).

Dealing with a volume of e-mail is not as big a problem as phone calls or paper correspondence. E-mail arrives in neat electronically readable, labelled packages. You can automatically sort and sift your e-mail to reduce the manual processing effort. You see what it was about and who it was from, without dealing with the detail.

The existing facilities built into e-mail packages allow you to sort, sift and file e-mail. This is adequate for dealing with messages as discrete entities, but don't allow for grouping messages into tasks. This requires work-flow software which can be programmed on the fly.

What messages haven't been delivered?

E-mail systems are built from the point of view of message management, rather than task or document management and so aren't sufficient on their own for handling e-mail.

Some e-mail systems let you request conformation when a message is delivered. This is exactly the opposite of what I want in most cases. What I want to know is when a message was not responded to. Most messages are delivered okay and the recipient sends me a reply within a reasonable amount of time. I would like this outgoing correspondence automatically filed and forgotten. It is only when I don't get a reply within a reasonable period, that I want to know about it. Exactly what a "reply" and a "reasonable period" are and how much could be automated, is something document management systems suppliers will be able to compete to supply.

Discussions, not messages

Generally e-mail creates a discussion on a topic. Paper correspondence tracking systems and "work-flow" systems handle this in a very crude way, by allowing a reply to correspondence (or a fixed next step in a work-flow sequence) to be recorded. In the e-mail environment more flexibility is required. A message sets off a chain reaction of replies, forwards and replies to forwards of replies. These need to be recorded and the interrelationship understood by the document management system.

Keep as long as necessary

Most e-mail need not be kept, some is very important. There needs to be better ways to work out what is important and keep it as long as in necessary. Identifying threads of discussion will help this; you need only mark a discussion as important and have the document management system keep all messages from that discussion.

The issues of if keeping electronic messages is legal and feasible have been discussed at length. I have chaired and participated in Commonwealth inter-departmental committees over the last three years, which prepared reports and recommendations on this:

In that time the Internet has grown up to provide a public infrastructure for transmitting electronic documents. What we lack is a way to reliably store these documents. There is now a large market created for systems for document storage. The industry needs to get on a build the required systems.

Make e-mail "normal"

Think of e-mail as the normal way you communicate and do business. This will be a routine part of an on-line world. We need to get the document management tools ready to deal with it.

See also