Email now has become the de facto standard for communication within the construction industry, management and retention of contractually important email is becoming a crucial issue facing by construction companies.
Will Yandell, Director of Union Square said “Many contractual details are 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.” Will Yandell added that standard business tools such as Microsoft Outlook do not always serve the best interests of the industry.
Will Yandell further added that in practical term the companies can be protected by adopting the following seven steps to email compliance:
- Don’t make end users responsible for filing and archiving emails – automate the entire process.
- Make a decision to store everything received and sent by anyone in the company to ensure nothing is lost.
- Don’t use your email system as the storage repository for emails. Email systems were not designed to be filing systems.
- Use a SQL database to store email in their native format. A database can improve the speed of searching and make integration much easier.
- Make sure that emails cannot be tampered with once archived.
- The system should make it easy for end users to find emails at a later date. It should be simple to search for specific content and attachments filed alongside.
The system should be seen as part of a wider knowledge management system strategy (refer previous posted article) which may have particular value in allowing entire project teams to see certain emails.
(source: insITe THE MAGAZINE OF THE IT CONSTRUCTION FORUM)
Bovis Lend Lease has adopted similar steps above as the company realizes the importance of the emails which may have contractual implication. Email transaction is therefore is closely managed and in order to ensure that the information contained in the emails is guarded and available for future use and reference, every 90 days the emails will be automatically archived and stored in main servers. All the emails will be stored in one main server located at the parent company head office (Australia). All emails in associated companies around the world will be archived and stored in the server (vault) which will be managed by a dedicated IT team. All archived emails however can be searched, retrieved etc easily from any associated office around the world.
Email generation is not confined in the office only but with the advanced telecommunication technology, it can be generated on the move (i.e. Mobile email via handphone, PDA etc).
Interestingly, recently email has been blamed to cause low productivity and interaction among the employees in office operation. There is study being conducted to assess this hypothesis and there is also company promoting “no email day” to encourage face-to-face communication and interaction.
There are employees that send email to ask or tell something but the recipients are actually just sitting in the next cubicle, imagine that!!!
SMS
Other technology that will pose similar issue as email above is SMS. SMS has become an important tool in today communication. The legality of this mode of communication however is still unknown and untested. Personal working experience has shown instruction and agreement are sometime made and communicated via SMS. Therefore it is very important that this information is also kept or archived for future reference similarly as Email.
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