GOVERNMENT TECHNOLOGY/Finding e-mails
Each city and county government generates and receives dozens, if not hundreds, of e-mails every day, including citizens’ inquiries, complaints, contracts and interoffice communications. The growth of e-mail use presents several problems to city and county IT departments trying to comply with their states’ public records regulations, which may require local governments to grant the public access to all information, including e-mail messages and attachments.
The common method of message storage — regularly dumping e-mails from individuals’ accounts onto back-up tapes — has several problems. First, individual users are able to determine which records to keep and delete, and nothing can prevent them from losing or accidentally deleting information in e-mail messages. Second, once the messages are on the back-up tapes, there is no way to determine what information is contained within them. An e-mail from a contractor submitting a bid can be on the same tape as a mayor’s message to his or her staffers. Staff members who have to sift through volumes of non-indexed messages to search for a specific document can tie up thousands of dollars and countless hours.
Additionally, retaining messages on individual e-mail systems requires a significant amount of storage space. According to a recent report by The Radicati Group, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based market research firm, the average business e-mail user now sends and receives 76 messages per day. The report predicts that number will grow to 100 messages per day by 2007. The average user now sends and receives 7 megabites of data every day. The report expects that figure to increase to 14.7 megabites per day by 2007.
As an alternative to individual e-mail systems and back-up tapes, several software companies have developed products that automatically move e-mails off users’ systems to a central archive. The software creates a searchable database where authorized personnel can recover specific documents quickly, ensuring against loss or accidental deletion and preserving storage space.
Oceanside, Calif., has switched from using back-up tapes for e-mail storage to a central archiving system. As the third largest city in San Diego County with a population of 165,000, it receives between 9,000 and 12,000 e-mails a day. According to Michael Sherwood, the city’s chief information officer, fulfilling just one public records request before the new system could take days or even weeks. “Although the process of locating and recovering e-mails was extremely time consuming and expensive, the fact is the law mandates that e-mail must be available for public review,” Sherwood says. “We didn’t want to be challenged on that.”
With the city’s current storage software, all e-mails that pass through the city’s e-mail system are automatically stored in their original format (message and attachment). The software also provides a means to search records, retrieve messages and package the results for inspection by the city attorney, who then can deliver them to the initial requestor.
The city has reduced its search and retrieval time by 95 percent, which allows it to quickly help residents who request public information. “We’re providing our citizens with an efficient means of accessing information,” Sherwood adds. “They know if they request information, we’ll provide it quickly.”
The author is vice president and general manager for Arlington, Texas-based KVS Inc.
