The value of e-mail at Darwin Professional Underwriters issimple to see for the company's CIO, Bob Asensio: In Darwin'sdisaster recovery plans, the return of e-mail service needs to bealmost instantaneous. "I believe e-mail probably is the mostcritical system our IT department manages," says Asensio.

E-mail has come a long way in a short time. Its use has becomeso massive some business people believe it is robbing people ofinterpersonal skills. A few businesses even have started No E-MailFridays, as if it could be controlled like business-casualwardrobe.

Sara Radicati, president and CEO of the Radicati Group, amanagement consulting company, estimates the average business usergets about 100 e-mail messages a day, and the number keeps growingannually. "The number is spiraling, but the problem is people areputting the focus [of perceived communication problems] on e-mailerroneously," she says. "If employees weren't using e-mail, itwould 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 fromother forms of communication. "It's hard to judge, but putting theblame on e-mail is not the solution," she says.

"E-mail is a critical customer communication, and being able tomanage that in the underwriting and claims processes and not losetrack of the documents is very important," says Matt Josefowicz,director of insurance for the consultant Novarica.

Darwin Professional Underwriters is a relatively young companyheading into its fifth year, according to Asensio. The carriernever has placed limits on mailbox size nor done anything to policee-mail, but over the last 13 months, Asensio claims the company'se-mail volume has grown by 70 percent. Growing pains have beenevident in several areas, but backing up the e-mail server has beenparticularly difficult. "E-mail is notoriously hard to back up," hesays. Darwin currently has a backup window that starts on Fridaynight and runs until about noon on Monday.

Asensio reports his company is in the process of addressingseveral e-mail issues, including record retention and space. "We'relooking at putting in an e-mail archive solution," he says. Darwinhas been researching the problem, meeting with vendors, goingthrough demos, and trying to look at it not as an isolated problembut as storage management and record-retention issues. "We want tosee whether we can make some headway into establishing the way wewant to manage our storage while providing for record retentionwith better backups," he says.

Archiving will fix the problem of lengthy backups, notesAsensio. "As you create these archives you can close them up orhave an open archive," he says. "It will simplify our backup windowquite a bit."

Carlos Correa, assistant vice president and U.S. informationtechnology manager for Liberty International Underwriters (LIU),doesn't dispute the increase in the amount of e-mail received bybusiness users, but he blames part of the glut on the size ofattachments that come with the e-mail. "That puts a strain on allof the systems with the amount of employees we have and the amountof retention that's held on the system," he says. Individual usersmanage their own inbox, particularly what they archive, retain, anddelete. "That taxes the systems from a storage perspective," hesays.

Correa has found several companies limit the size of attachmentsthat come into the company. Anything larger than set limits isbounced back to the sender, and those types of messages then aresent 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 isa young company that has been growing over the last nine years,according to Correa. "We have an entrepreneurial culture that hasled people to use e-mail quite a bit," he says. "Some of the stepswe are taking are controlling the amount of e-mail we have on ourservers and the space that is required. We are getting that takencare of so we are not growing beyond the means that are requiredhere."

Josefowicz contends the size of the company is directly relatedto the need to control the volume of e-mail it receives. "Once youget to the very large companies, you have different issues in termsof managing the huge amounts of data associated with the e-mail[large companies] receive," he says. But a more tangible issue fora lot of insurers besides data storage and management issues isintegrating e-mail into workflow processes and workflow systemsthat weren't necessarily designed for such activity, he adds.

This relates to tasks such as making sure you can attach ane-mail to a case file just as easily as you could attach a scanneddocument; making sure you can attach an e-mail to a customerservice interaction record the same way you can attach call notes;and making sure customer service requests get treated with the samesense of urgency as a customer service call, according toJosefowicz.

E-mail servers and mailbox management are stand-alone systems,explains Josefowicz, but they have to be integrated with all thevarious workflow productivity systems a carrier has in place, suchas contact management systems for service centers, or casemanagement for claims or underwriting. "These systems have to beintegrated with the e-mail system so vital information can betracked and not lost," he says. "From a compliance point of view,e-mail correspondence has to be treated with the same level ofretention and confidentiality as any other correspondence."

Darwin uses a company called Message One, which saves everye-mail for a period of two weeks. "If something would happen to ourfacility or our e-mail would go down, we could continue to use oure-mail account from any browser," he says. Users need Internetaccess to view their last two weeks of e-mail and any new messagescoming in. "We can switch over to that in a matter of a couple ofminutes," says Asensio.

Darwin also uses a company called Message Labs to control theamount of spam entering the carrier's e-mail system. Some carrierskeep spam filtering in-house, but Asensio likes the arrangementwith Message Labs. "That is [Message Labs'] business," he says. Thecompany "layers on things it's written itself, and it is prettygood at it. This keeps us out of that game and allows us to do whatwe do here."

LIU has a system that auto-archives every employee's e-mailafter 45 days. Messages are taken off the exchange server and movedonto a separate server. The archived messages are compressed totake up less space. Users can extract archived messages, and theclock restarts–45 days later the message is archived onceagain.

Another step taken by LIU is to enable business users to link toa report on the carrier's dashboards rather than have peoplepassing around Excel spreadsheets with a chain of e-mail includingthe same attachment to multiple users. "That just causes anexponential explosion," says Correa. "One particular e-mail mightreside in 20 different people's e-mail boxes."

Josefowicz does not believe large insurance carriers are doing agood job of dealing with all the e-mail issues. "A lot of companiesare erring on the safety side of keeping everything, but keepingeverything can lead to long-term storage and legal problems," hesays. Retaining all the e-mail that goes through a system isexpensive, particularly if the company keeps things longer thannecessary. "It may come back to bite you," he warns.

He suggests carriers sit down with their legal advisors todetermine what the retention requirements should be and to followthe most stringent line of the jurisdictions in which carriers dobusiness so they will be covered for all the otherjurisdictions.

Upgrading e-mail performance is on the to-do list for large andsmall companies, reports Josefowicz, although he believes storageand retention issues are more of an ongoing, slow-burn operationalissue. Being able to support e-mail integration into the workflowdefinitely is a business competitiveness issue, though. "Customerswho can't interact with you effectively using e-mail are going tobe frustrated, particularly business customers," he says. "Carriersneed to develop an effective way to leverage data through e-mail inunderwriting and claims when there are loss photos coming inelectronically and when property reports are coming inelectronically. A lot of companies whose document workflow wasdesigned for scanned images of paper have a hard time adjusting todocuments originated electronically."

Even a technologist such as Craig Lowenthal, CIO of NYMAGIC,worries about losing the human touch. "Unfortunately, e-mail can'tproperly convey emotion and body language," he says, explaining helikes to use exclamation points when writing to convey hisexcitement over something, but those exclamation points have beenconstrued by others as a form of yelling. "Those are two completelydifferent meanings," he says.

Lowenthal concedes a lot of his day is spent viewing hismailbox. "I use it as a to-do list, and anything I know isoutstanding I keep marked as unread so I can manage the outstandingthings I have," he says. He acknowledges it is a bit of aconundrum. "You don't want to be a slave to your mailbox, but bythe 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 themidst of a meeting, though. "I stop and tell them when they arefinished [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 insociety, because of the ubiquity of the BlackBerry, people feelwhen they send an e-mail to you they should get a responseimmediately," he says.

Radicati would like to see more training in e-mail etiquette andhow to use it efficiently. She feels the biggest etiquette issueinvolves the copy function. "Copying has two effects," saysRadicati. "It makes it easier to spray an e-mail to people whomight not be interested in participating in the discussion. That'sone issue individuals complain about constantly. Their e-mailinboxes are flooded because somebody thought they should be copiedon a conversation where they have very little interest."

Even worse, she continues, such copying tends to be used bypeople when they are getting into an argument as a way to escalatethe discussion. "That can get nasty quickly as you have e-mail warswhere someone is writing and copying to the recipient's bosses andthat person is replying to the sender's bosses," she says. "Toomuch of this becomes pollution for everyone in your organization,and it's an unproductive way to handle a difference ofopinion."

Copying too many people on an e-mail message plays a significantrole in the increase of e-mail, agrees Lowenthal. On the positiveside, he asserts being a part of the copying system helpssupervisors manage the people who report to them, but it also canlead to managing the e-mail inbox rather than the people who aresending the e-mail messages.

NYMAGIC is not doing anything official to address the copyingissue, but Lowenthal has spoken with his direct-reports on theissue. "I know we get a lot of e-mail, and so it is easy to sayyou'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 itgoes back and forth," he indicates. "People think their workday isprocessing their e-mail box," he says. "E-mail is a communicationmethod. Some people just want to get a problem out of their mailboxinstead of attacking the problem."

Another issue companies have to deal with is theinstantaneousness of e-mail messages. As Lowenthal points out, inearlier times when there was information to distribute within acompany, someone would send an internal office memo, and recipientsmight get it that day or the next, depending on the floor of thebuilding where they worked. Today, though, everything is urgent."If you don't respond to an e-mail within an hour, people arewondering 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 aresomewhat of an acknowledgement the carrier is not going to try tomake users change the way they operate until Darwin has othersolutions in place. "By doing this, users will pretty much continueto work the way they work today," says Asensio. "Everything they doin Outlook will be there, but [IT] will be more efficient in theway we store things and back up and cover ourselves with any recordretention or discovery-type challenges we might face," he says.

In addition, if Darwin is able to get these solutions in placeand solve its current challenges, the carrier can start looking atother ways of storing documents that might alleviate some of thedependency on the e-mail system. "For instance, we'll do somethingwith document management, do more with blogs and instant messagingand things of that nature to pull out of e-mail some of thenonbusiness communication if possible," notes Asensio. "That'll bea slow change in culture over the next few years."

Asensio sees document management as a major help in dealing withe-mail. "People love the e-mail interface, and you see that whenyou speak with the document management companies," he says."[Vendors] pretty much all work with Outlook. They try to integratewith that because people have a comfort level with Outlook."

Those companies without a document management system in placehave documents being sent around via e-mail for collaboration, butthe business users aren't sure whether they are viewing the samecopy of the document. "That's a common problem dealing withcollaboration efforts," says Asensio.

That is particularly true with a growing company such as Darwin,where most business is conducted through e-mail. Asensio estimates90 percent of Darwin's submissions come through e-mail. "We alsohave more people employed here," he says. "There is morecommunication through e-mail."

Instant messaging is becoming an equal partner with e-mail,suggests Radicati, who believes a lot of attention is being placedon its use within the corporate environment. "It's a technologythat started in the consumer world and migrated into the corporateworld," she says. Because IM is so immediate, people tend to writein a way they wouldn't if they were sending an e-mail. "There aregood products to do security for IM, but overall I believe thereare fewer security problems, particularly with spam and viruses,"says Radicati.

As far as text messaging, business people in Europe and Asia areregular users, reports Radicati. In the U.S., though, most businessusers lean toward wireless e-mail from their cell phones forbusiness use.

Business users at LIU do not use text messaging or instantmessaging at this time. "We find anything you would be using textmessaging or IM for would be something you could accomplish throughe-mail," says Correa. "The benefits [of texting or IM] would beminimal."

The advent of text messaging in the business world also worriesLowenthal. "You see lines start to blur between e-mail and textmessaging," he says. "Some e-mail is written professionally, butthen you see text-message slang start to creep into e-mail, andthat becomes the norm, which doesn't make sense to me."

NYMAGIC, like many companies, has a dedicated e-mail address forproduction support and help desk, but there still are those whowould rather send an e-mail to the CIO if they have a problembecause 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 outmy BlackBerry, so those people just slowed down the process," saysLowenthal. "Too many people feel that is the way to handleemergency or high-priority situations, and I don't believe that atall."

E-mail is managed at NYMAGIC as part of the carrier'sinfrastructure group, with one person dedicated to managing andmaintaining Microsoft Exchange. The carrier uses a product toarchive its older e-mail. After two weeks, all attachments areplaced in near-line storage and out of the exchange database. Also,any messages more than six months old are purged. "If you needsomething for more than six months, you have to store it in ourcontent management system," says Lowenthal.

E-mail sent to Liberty International Underwriters is handled bythe carrier's infrastructure team, which manages the e-mail serversand the BlackBerry devices, as well. "Our policies come down fromthe global IT department as far as corporate policies andelements," says Correa.

Lowenthal believes emergencies should be handled over the phone."One of the fears I have is the desocialization of the world," hesays. "People increasingly aren't talking to one another but rathere-mailing or texting. You can't lose that personalization ofspeaking. There's no substitute for voice inflections or bodylanguage. I don't care how good electronic communicationbecomes."

While some companies have gained attention by launchinge-mail-free days to encourage more verbal communication within theoffice (e-mail contact is still allowed with outside customers),Radicati is not a believer. "My comment to people is, Why don't wehave a 'No Phone Thursday' or a 'No Meeting Wednesday'?" she says."People need to communicate. They either sit in meetings all daylong, phone each other, or use e-mail or some form of socialnetworking software. People are communicating."

In contrast, Lowenthal is intrigued by the talk of no e-maildays for internal communication within a company. "That might be alittle extreme, but it makes a point," he says. "It forcesinteraction, which I think you need. I've had friends for years Ihaven't spoken to. I communicate with them by e-mail. It's almostlike you are talking, but you haven't heard their voice or seenthem. There's something wrong about that."