By Melanie Turek, Senior Vice President, Nemertes Research Inc.

March 31, 2006

News of a lawsuit between Morgan Stanley and one of its former employees proves a good example of why companies need to give more than technical consideration to the policies they put in place for e-mail and IM archiving. When asked, 90% of IT executives say they consider e-mail and IM messages to be corporate information, according to Nemertes benchmark, “Information Stewardship: Holistic Data Management in the Enterprise.” On the other hand, only 50% of companies include messaging as part of their compliance efforts—and then very often, they only include e-mail and not IM. For those companies, however, archiving is about more than just technology.

Arthur Riel, a former IT manager with Morgan Stanley whose job was to create a database of archived messages, filed suit in January claiming he was wrongfully dismissed after finding potentially damaging corporate e-mail. Morgan Stanley
accused Riel of being "engaged in a deliberate, extensive, and surreptitious review of other employees’ e-mails."

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