The value of e-mail at Darwin Professional Underwriters is simple to see for the company’s CIO, Bob Asensio: In Darwin’s disaster recovery plans, the return of e-mail service needs to be almost instantaneous. “I believe e-mail probably is the most critical system our IT department manages,” says Asensio.
E-mail has come a long way in a short time. Its use has become so massive some business people believe it is robbing people of interpersonal skills. A few businesses even have started No E-Mail Fridays, as if it could be controlled like business-casual wardrobe.
Sara Radicati, president and CEO of the Radicati Group, a management consulting company, estimates the average business user gets about 100 e-mail messages a day, and the number keeps growing annually. “The number is spiraling, but the problem is people are putting the focus [of perceived communication problems] on e-mail erroneously,” she says. “If employees weren’t using e-mail, it would be something else—meetings, phone calls, letters.”
E-mail makes it so much easier for people to do their work, Radicati acknowledges, but it also takes time and effort away from other forms of communication. “It’s hard to judge, but putting the blame on e-mail is not the solution,” she says.
“E-mail is a critical customer communication, and being able to manage that in the underwriting and claims processes and not lose track of the documents is very important,” says Matt Josefowicz, director of insurance for the consultant Novarica.
Darwin Professional Underwriters is a relatively young company heading into its fifth year, according to Asensio. The carrier never has placed limits on mailbox size nor done anything to police e-mail, but over the last 13 months, Asensio claims the company’s e-mail volume has grown by 70 percent. Growing pains have been evident in several areas, but backing up the e-mail server has been particularly difficult. “E-mail is notoriously hard to back up,” he says. Darwin currently has a backup window that starts on Friday night and runs until about noon on Monday.
Asensio reports his company is in the process of addressing several e-mail issues, including record retention and space. “We’re looking at putting in an e-mail archive solution,” he says. Darwin has been researching the problem, meeting with vendors, going through demos, and trying to look at it not as an isolated problem but as storage management and record-retention issues. “We want to see whether we can make some headway into establishing the way we want to manage our storage while providing for record retention with better backups,” he says.
Archiving will fix the problem of lengthy backups, notes Asensio. “As you create these archives you can close them up or have an open archive,” he says. “It will simplify our backup window quite a bit.”
Carlos Correa, assistant vice president and U.S. information technology manager for Liberty International Underwriters (LIU), doesn’t dispute the increase in the amount of e-mail received by business users, but he blames part of the glut on the size of attachments that come with the e-mail. “That puts a strain on all of the systems with the amount of employees we have and the amount of retention that’s held on the system,” he says. Individual users manage their own inbox, particularly what they archive, retain, and delete. “That taxes the systems from a storage perspective,” he says.
Correa has found several companies limit the size of attachments that come into the company. Anything larger than set limits is bounced back to the sender, and those types of messages then are sent either through a file transfer protocol site or on disks, rather than coming through the e-mail system.
Although LIU is part of the Liberty Mutual Group, LIU itself is a young company that has been growing over the last nine years, according to Correa. “We have an entrepreneurial culture that has led people to use e-mail quite a bit,” he says. “Some of the steps we are taking are controlling the amount of e-mail we have on our servers and the space that is required. We are getting that taken care of so we are not growing beyond the means that are required here.”
Josefowicz contends the size of the company is directly related to the need to control the volume of e-mail it receives. “Once you get to the very large companies, you have different issues in terms of managing the huge amounts of data associated with the e-mail [large companies] receive,” he says. But a more tangible issue for a lot of insurers besides data storage and management issues is integrating e-mail into workflow processes and workflow systems that weren’t necessarily designed for such activity, he adds.
This relates to tasks such as making sure you can attach an e-mail to a case file just as easily as you could attach a scanned document; making sure you can attach an e-mail to a customer service interaction record the same way you can attach call notes; and making sure customer service requests get treated with the same sense of urgency as a customer service call, according to Josefowicz.
E-mail servers and mailbox management are stand-alone systems, explains Josefowicz, but they have to be integrated with all the various workflow productivity systems a carrier has in place, such as contact management systems for service centers, or case management for claims or underwriting. “These systems have to be integrated with the e-mail system so vital information can be tracked and not lost,” he says. “From a compliance point of view, e-mail correspondence has to be treated with the same level of retention and confidentiality as any other correspondence.”
Darwin uses a company called Message One, which saves every e-mail for a period of two weeks. “If something would happen to our facility or our e-mail would go down, we could continue to use our e-mail account from any browser,” he says. Users need Internet access to view their last two weeks of e-mail and any new messages coming in. “We can switch over to that in a matter of a couple of minutes,” says Asensio.
Darwin also uses a company called Message Labs to control the amount of spam entering the carrier’s e-mail system. Some carriers keep spam filtering in-house, but Asensio likes the arrangement with Message Labs. “That is [Message Labs’] business,” he says. The company “layers on things it’s written itself, and it is pretty good at it. This keeps us out of that game and allows us to do what we do here.”
LIU has a system that auto-archives every employee’s e-mail after 45 days. Messages are taken off the exchange server and moved onto a separate server. The archived messages are compressed to take up less space. Users can extract archived messages, and the clock restarts—45 days later the message is archived once again.
Another step taken by LIU is to enable business users to link to a report on the carrier’s dashboards rather than have people passing around Excel spreadsheets with a chain of e-mail including the same attachment to multiple users. “That just causes an exponential explosion,” says Correa. “One particular e-mail might reside in 20 different people’s e-mail boxes.”
Josefowicz does not believe large insurance carriers are doing a good job of dealing with all the e-mail issues. “A lot of companies are erring on the safety side of keeping everything, but keeping everything can lead to long-term storage and legal problems,” he says. Retaining all the e-mail that goes through a system is expensive, particularly if the company keeps things longer than necessary. “It may come back to bite you,” he warns.
He suggests carriers sit down with their legal advisors to determine what the retention requirements should be and to follow the most stringent line of the jurisdictions in which carriers do business so they will be covered for all the other jurisdictions.
Upgrading e-mail performance is on the to-do list for large and small companies, reports Josefowicz, although he believes storage and retention issues are more of an ongoing, slow-burn operational issue. Being able to support e-mail integration into the workflow definitely is a business competitiveness issue, though. “Customers who can’t interact with you effectively using e-mail are going to be frustrated, particularly business customers,” he says. “Carriers need to develop an effective way to leverage data through e-mail in underwriting and claims when there are loss photos coming in electronically and when property reports are coming in electronically. A lot of companies whose document workflow was designed for scanned images of paper have a hard time adjusting to documents originated electronically.”
Even a technologist such as Craig Lowenthal, CIO of NYMAGIC, worries about losing the human touch. “Unfortunately, e-mail can’t properly convey emotion and body language,” he says, explaining he likes to use exclamation points when writing to convey his excitement over something, but those exclamation points have been construed by others as a form of yelling. “Those are two completely different meanings,” he says.
Lowenthal concedes a lot of his day is spent viewing his mailbox. “I use it as a to-do list, and anything I know is outstanding I keep marked as unread so I can manage the outstanding things I have,” he says. He acknowledges it is a bit of a conundrum. “You don’t want to be a slave to your mailbox, but by the same token, I’m using my mailbox as a to-do list,” he remarks. He loses patience with those who pull out their BlackBerry in the midst of a meeting, though. “I stop and tell them when they are finished [with their BlackBerry] we’ll go on,” he says. Nevertheless, he realizes there are certain expectations at work. “You want to respond in a reasonable time, but what’s happening in society, because of the ubiquity of the BlackBerry, people feel when they send an e-mail to you they should get a response immediately,” he says.
Radicati would like to see more training in e-mail etiquette and how to use it efficiently. She feels the biggest etiquette issue involves the copy function. “Copying has two effects,” says Radicati. “It makes it easier to spray an e-mail to people who might not be interested in participating in the discussion. That’s one issue individuals complain about constantly. Their e-mail inboxes are flooded because somebody thought they should be copied on a conversation where they have very little interest.”
Even worse, she continues, such copying tends to be used by people when they are getting into an argument as a way to escalate the discussion. “That can get nasty quickly as you have e-mail wars where someone is writing and copying to the recipient’s bosses and that person is replying to the sender’s bosses,” she says. “Too much of this becomes pollution for everyone in your organization, and it’s an unproductive way to handle a difference of opinion.”
Copying too many people on an e-mail message plays a significant role in the increase of e-mail, agrees Lowenthal. On the positive side, he asserts being a part of the copying system helps supervisors manage the people who report to them, but it also can lead to managing the e-mail inbox rather than the people who are sending the e-mail messages.
NYMAGIC is not doing anything official to address the copying issue, but Lowenthal has spoken with his direct-reports on the issue. “I know we get a lot of e-mail, and so it is easy to say you’ve responded to that e-mail and it is off your plate for now, but you could see that same e-mail come back 10 or 11 times as it goes back and forth,” he indicates. “People think their workday is processing their e-mail box,” he says. “E-mail is a communication method. Some people just want to get a problem out of their mailbox instead of attacking the problem.”
Another issue companies have to deal with is the instantaneousness of e-mail messages. As Lowenthal points out, in earlier times when there was information to distribute within a company, someone would send an internal office memo, and recipients might get it that day or the next, depending on the floor of the building where they worked. Today, though, everything is urgent. “If you don’t respond to an e-mail within an hour, people are wondering whether you are OK,” he says.
It is difficult to change the way business users view e-mail, Asensio contends, so the investments Darwin is about to make are somewhat of an acknowledgement the carrier is not going to try to make users change the way they operate until Darwin has other solutions in place. “By doing this, users will pretty much continue to work the way they work today,” says Asensio. “Everything they do in Outlook will be there, but [IT] will be more efficient in the way we store things and back up and cover ourselves with any record retention or discovery-type challenges we might face,” he says.
In addition, if Darwin is able to get these solutions in place and solve its current challenges, the carrier can start looking at other ways of storing documents that might alleviate some of the dependency on the e-mail system. “For instance, we’ll do something with document management, do more with blogs and instant messaging and things of that nature to pull out of e-mail some of the nonbusiness communication if possible,” notes Asensio. “That’ll be a slow change in culture over the next few years.”
Asensio sees document management as a major help in dealing with e-mail. “People love the e-mail interface, and you see that when you speak with the document management companies,” he says. “[Vendors] pretty much all work with Outlook. They try to integrate with that because people have a comfort level with Outlook.”
Those companies without a document management system in place have documents being sent around via e-mail for collaboration, but the business users aren’t sure whether they are viewing the same copy of the document. “That’s a common problem dealing with collaboration efforts,” says Asensio.
That is particularly true with a growing company such as Darwin, where most business is conducted through e-mail. Asensio estimates 90 percent of Darwin’s submissions come through e-mail. “We also have more people employed here,” he says. “There is more communication through e-mail.”
Instant messaging is becoming an equal partner with e-mail, suggests Radicati, who believes a lot of attention is being placed on its use within the corporate environment. “It’s a technology that started in the consumer world and migrated into the corporate world,” she says. Because IM is so immediate, people tend to write in a way they wouldn’t if they were sending an e-mail. “There are good products to do security for IM, but overall I believe there are fewer security problems, particularly with spam and viruses,” says Radicati.
As far as text messaging, business people in Europe and Asia are regular users, reports Radicati. In the U.S., though, most business users lean toward wireless e-mail from their cell phones for business use.
Business users at LIU do not use text messaging or instant messaging at this time. “We find anything you would be using text messaging or IM for would be something you could accomplish through e-mail,” says Correa. “The benefits [of texting or IM] would be minimal.”
The advent of text messaging in the business world also worries Lowenthal. “You see lines start to blur between e-mail and text messaging,” he says. “Some e-mail is written professionally, but then you see text-message slang start to creep into e-mail, and that becomes the norm, which doesn’t make sense to me.”
NYMAGIC, like many companies, has a dedicated e-mail address for production support and help desk, but there still are those who would rather send an e-mail to the CIO if they have a problem because they feel the issue will be taken better care of that way. “But if I’m in meetings six or eight hours a day, I rarely pull out my BlackBerry, so those people just slowed down the process,” says Lowenthal. “Too many people feel that is the way to handle emergency or high-priority situations, and I don’t believe that at all.”
E-mail is managed at NYMAGIC as part of the carrier’s infrastructure group, with one person dedicated to managing and maintaining Microsoft Exchange. The carrier uses a product to archive its older e-mail. After two weeks, all attachments are placed in near-line storage and out of the exchange database. Also, any messages more than six months old are purged. “If you need something for more than six months, you have to store it in our content management system,” says Lowenthal.
E-mail sent to Liberty International Underwriters is handled by the carrier’s infrastructure team, which manages the e-mail servers and the BlackBerry devices, as well. “Our policies come down from the global IT department as far as corporate policies and elements,” says Correa.
Lowenthal believes emergencies should be handled over the phone. “One of the fears I have is the desocialization of the world,” he says. “People increasingly aren’t talking to one another but rather e-mailing or texting. You can’t lose that personalization of speaking. There’s no substitute for voice inflections or body language. I don’t care how good electronic communication becomes.”
While some companies have gained attention by launching e-mail-free days to encourage more verbal communication within the office (e-mail contact is still allowed with outside customers), Radicati is not a believer. “My comment to people is, Why don’t we have a ‘No Phone Thursday’ or a ‘No Meeting Wednesday’?” she says. “People need to communicate. They either sit in meetings all day long, phone each other, or use e-mail or some form of social networking software. People are communicating.”
In contrast, Lowenthal is intrigued by the talk of no e-mail days for internal communication within a company. “That might be a little extreme, but it makes a point,” he says. “It forces interaction, which I think you need. I’ve had friends for years I haven’t spoken to. I communicate with them by e-mail. It’s almost like you are talking, but you haven’t heard their voice or seen them. There’s something wrong about that.”