Lots of the comments here are missing the point. In my experience at enormous companies (that have had e-mail policies, in varying degrees, like this one), they have zero to do with productivity and have everything to do with the various laws, rules, and regulations surrounding data retention of e-mail.
To put this in the best possible light, consider a rogue manager of a publicly traded company, who is discovered by the company and subsequently fired. If he does something bad with a legally-mandated paper trail, we're talking about discoverable material that would show up in any serious lawsuit about an unrelated matter. If we're talking about a crazy internal system that deliberately never logged anything in the first place, the company is open to much less legal liability.
Forgive my ignorance, but if a company exists in an industry with mandated data retention/logging, wouldn’t those laws apply equally to IM as to email? In other words, if the law requires that internal communication be logged they’d be screwed either way in your scenario.
Maybe the laws in question are so narrowly crafted that they apply only to email, I don’t know. Seems like a strange justification for the switch though.
>wouldn’t those laws apply equally to IM as to email? In other words, if the law requires that internal communication be logged they’d be screwed either way in your scenario.
As someone who has written email and IM compliance software used by 22 of the top 25 banks I can tell you that there is a requirement for data retention of any electronic communication for the vast majority of financial institutions. If you're required by law to archive your communications you need to either comply or get an exemption from your regulator (highly unlikely).
This mitigation strategy only works if the law doesn't require you to retain the data. I've worked at communication companies that only retained email for 7 days, but they weren't obligated to retain their emails by law.
Companies often have policies which dictate rapid purging of communications and other documents (such as every month). This allows them to escape an Enron style paper shredding fiasco, and in certain industries is very advantageous.
Of course, that's not to say this what Atos has in mind, but it's not a new tactic by any means.
Yes. But relatively few industries actually have such a requirement. This particular company is a consulting company.
The other thing to consider is that Microsoft Lync is also a phone and video chat system. Don't assume that IM replaces email -- I'd bet you would see alot of voice/video.
In a country with a healthy, functioning government, this sort of deliberate corporate evasion would be swiftly recognized, and countered with rewrites to the legislation, or legislation which was more flexible to begin with.
This doesn't seem too hard to me. If we've really decided as a society to make corporations track and retain data about their everyday operations and internal communication, then let's DO THAT. This silliness about whether it's ASCII text sent as email, or ASCII text sent as text messages, is just embarrassing.
It's not deliberate evasion. Email systems weren't originally designed with strict data retention policies in mind. I know Exchange offers some features in this regard, but even there I doubt it's impossible for a user to innocently create an archive outside the reach of the policy.
Web messaging applications that do everything server-side are much more readily "locked down" in this regard (properly designed web mail would work just as well).
Sure, it's all just data, and if I'm sufficiently clever I can always make copies of it. But then I'm operating outside the policy. The point is that if everyone follows the policy, all data that shouldn't be retained won't be. It's much easier to write and implement such a data retention policy when the data's only permanent home is on a server.
Very interesting comment. Remember Groupwise or Lotus Notes - the whole groupware craze? This is a great argument for a tightly controlled proprietary internal communications system and I wonder if we might see a resurrection of the groupware fad.
The article says they are using Office Communicator, part of the Office suite, so I'd imagine they are going full-bore on that. Wonder if they are using SharePoint for the wiki, too.
I agree. I'm involved with 3 organizations of my own plus I work with countless businesses large and small. One is a web startup, the other a "small business" (there's a difference), one a registered non-profit, and then the various businesses that I'm a vendor for. In my experience I've seen a very obvious trend suggesting that everyone from single person operations all the way to corporate giants have to constantly battle to work together with employees, vendors, etc. because of a lack of a good communication system. I've introduced a few of them to the products the guys at 37Signals offer and those who use it love it.
I'm not sure if Basecamp, Backpack, and Highrise are technically groupware but that's what I consider it. But really, these are all tools and there's no magic bullet. We just have to find a way to use right tools for the right job and make sure those we work with understand that each tool has its purpose. We'll have to explain to Joe Staffmember that email is not Google Docs and Skype isn't always a replacement for the telephone, etc.
One drawn out litigation is all you need to start a chain of legal holds that end up forcing you to retain email indefinitely. One of the organizations that I'm familiar with is retaining all email sent or received since 1992, due to a series of long-standing lawsuits. If you're retaining email for one litigation, it can and will be used in a subsequent litigation if you have it.
But on the other hand, many, if not most email communications are ephemeral in nature. In many large companies and government especially, IM was seen as a toy that kids played with, and was banished from corporate networks. At the same time, they provide NO convenient tools for sharing data and NO ability to search through the limited data storage options available.
The result? Employees use email to send IM-like messages, and the mailbox becomes a defacto, uncontrolled, electronic file cabinet.
So if you let people take care of ephemeral communications with IM/voice/video, (especially voice/video) you probably improve communications and limit liability. And if you use sharepoint or a similar tool to share stuff, you can setup retention policies, etc to manage those risks.
All I know about the data retention regulations is that every system that stores text has to retain the data. That basically means we can't use wikis, nopaste, non-official chat (like IRC), and so on. Interestingly, we can have all the in-person and and phone conversations we want, though. It doesn't make much sense.
You might be right but the post was written in a way that implies its simply some asinine policy they think will help productivity.
If the law requires the retention of all electronic communication, not just email, as others have suggested then IM is subject to those same rules. Furthermore, most IM clients these days keep conversation logs anyway so I'm more apt to believe they thing they're helping productivity. But you could be very right and it is an angle most of the commenters, including myself, have missed.
To put this in the best possible light, consider a rogue manager of a publicly traded company, who is discovered by the company and subsequently fired. If he does something bad with a legally-mandated paper trail, we're talking about discoverable material that would show up in any serious lawsuit about an unrelated matter. If we're talking about a crazy internal system that deliberately never logged anything in the first place, the company is open to much less legal liability.