Construction software specialist, Union Square Software, has announced a Seven Step Guide to email compliance for the construction industry.
With email now the de facto standard for communication within the construction supply chain, management and retention of contractually important email is becoming the crucial IT issue facing construction firms in the UK.
Will Yandell, Director of Union Square, explains: "Many contractual details are being agreed and confirmed in email messages, so the growth in legal responsibilities for looking after, and being able to produce, full email audit trails has increased.
"In addition, as part of an industry that works on a project basis, construction firms store and retrieve information in a different way to most other businesses. This means that standard business tools - such as Microsoft Outlook - do not always serve the best interests of the industry. In fact Outlook provides possibly the worst place to store contacts and emails."
Yandell continues: "Email also causes procedural and legal issues for managers, in deciding what exactly to ask their staff to do when they receive or send an email in order to preserve the message and its associated audit trail and how to implement this policy.
"Furthermore, the challenges for the IT department are enormous. It has to ensure that all email is backed up and does not get lost, not to mention the technical issues of retrieving a specific message or set of messages several years later."
So, in practical terms, what can you do to protect your organisation?
Union Square's Seven Step Guide to email compliance:
1. Don't make end-users responsible for filing/archiving emails. Take the responsibility out of their hands and automate the entire process.
2. Make a decision to store EVERYTHING that is received and sent by anyone in the organisation. That way you can be sure nothing is lost.
3. Don't use your email system as the filing/storage repository for emails. Email systems were not (believe it or not!) designed to be filing systems though more often than not that is what they have become. How often have you heard someone in your organisation complaining about the email system having "run out of storage"?!
4. Use a SQL database to store the emails in their native format. They are designed to deal with millions of records and scale successfully. This is very important as even small companies generate and receive a significant volume of emails. Using a database can significantly improve the speed of searching and can also make integration with other aspects of your IT strategy much easier e.g. linking emails with your Customer Relationship Management system.
5. Make sure that once archived the emails cannot be tampered with. It will be important later to show that the email has been stored in its original form and not tampered with.
6. The system should make it easy for end users to find emails at a later date, for example by being able to filter by project, or the sub-contractor who sent the email or by a particular contact or a date range. Full text searching should allow emails to be searched for any content and attachments filed with them.
7. The system should facilitate the easier sharing of knowledge and can be seen as part of a wider knowledge management strategy. This may have particular value within an activity such as a project where there will definitely be some operational advantages in allowing the entire team to see certain emails.
