The legal department was also impacted by the unmanaged email. Every email on the company system was potentially discoverable, even though much of it was redundant, obsolete or transitory information with little to no business value. The costs incurred throughout the eDiscovery processes can be directly correlated to the volume of information (particularly email) in an organization.
Faced with these challenges, NuStar® decided to establish a records and information management (RIM) program with RIM policies to support the defensible and consistent deletion of company information, including emails.
RIM policy compliant and practical
NuStar introduced their RIM program by implementing an email management solution to address the organization’s key requirements: reducing cost and risk. “Email was our biggest pain point,” states Clint Wentworth, records and information manager at NuStar Energy. “There were no email policies. Some people put everything in a PST file. Sometimes they’d store that PST on their hard drives on a shared drive, or on a thumb drive. Sometimes they’d put it in all three locations. It was all over the place in terms of our email.”
NuStar needed to find a way to simplify email management for the end users, while addressing the pressures on IT and the legal department.
“We had several objectives and goals,” says Wentworth. “We wanted to reduce the amount of email that we had and the amount of email that we kept on a regular basis. That leads directly to electronic discovery. The more data that is kept, the greater are the costs incurred. We also needed a way to apply our records retention schedule to email. We wanted to implement the ‘three-zone’ model of classifying email messages. We needed a system that could archive, stub and de-duplicate email files to save on storage. We needed to be able to place items on legal hold. We also want to extend the same records management functionality to all of our other files including those on file shares, Microsoft® SharePoint® and physical objects.”
Establishing control over email
After spending several months capturing their requirements and consulting with Gartner and other information management consultants, NuStar assessed several enterprise content management (ECM) vendors before selecting OpenText™ Content Suite, OpenText™ Archive, OpenText™ Email Management for Microsoft® Exchange and OpenText™ Records Management, to establish control over their email records. The interactive classification capabilities of Email Management and support for the “three-zone” email management model were a critical factors in their decision to go with OpenText.
Another factor in their decision to go with the OpenText solution was how well it complemented the Microsoft® Office suite.
“We wanted folks to say, ‘hey, that’s not so bad; I can do this. This is easy, it makes sense; I can work this into my way of organizing email.’ That was really our approach the whole time. We did not want to create unnecessary burden on our employees. The end user was in mind the whole time,” says Wentworth. “We wanted the most user friendly, most intuitive method possible for managing records and email, and that’s what the OpenText solution offers us.”