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Executive
Summary:
Document Text:
FOR
ACTION
To: Regional Directors/Representatives/Assistant
Representatives
Directors: Copenhagen,
Florence, Tokyo
New York management
Team/Section Chiefs
From: Carol
Bellamy
Executive
Director
Subject: Use of
Electronic Mail
Introduction
The
use of electronic mail in UNICEF has increased significantly in the
last 12 months as most offices are now data connected and all
Headquarters staff have e-mail facilities. E-Mail is a new form of
communication and its use has raised a variety of policy, technical
and cultural issues.
This instruction
is designed to address policy and practice issues that can be
identified at this time. The Director IRM Office will separately
issue any technical instructions or guidelines necessary within the
policy framework. I encourage feedback on this EXD, directed to the
IRM Director, especially on behavioral and cultural implications of
the use of e-mail which may necessitate additional guidelines or
training packages.
Importance
of e-mail
UNICEF must be prepared
to operate into the next century in the most efficient and effective
manner possible. Electronic mail (e-mail), when successfully
deployed, facilitates and speeds up communication directly between
interlocutors at lower cost than other forms of communication. An
organizational operational goal is to have all UNICEF desk staff
worldwide connected together by e-mail by the year 2000. This will
help position UNICEF as a knowledge based organization where
information can be shared with minimum constraints of geography and
time.
The attainment of the above
goal requires that offices develop the required infrastructure in
terms of PCs, local networks linking separate PCs and connections to
the UNICEF wide area network. Such infrastructure is needed not only
for e-mail but also for support of other initiatives such as the
Programme Manager System (PROMS) which is to be implemented in all
UNICEF offices by 1998.
E-Mail is an
organizational application that supports not only internal office
but also inter-office work. All offices must observe the e-mail
standard set by IRM Office which at present is
cc:mail.
Offices must ensure not only
that the technical infrastructure for e-mail is implemented but also
that it is maintained to be available in a reliable manner so that
interlocutors have the confidence that e-mail sent will be delivered
to its destination.
E-mail
privileges
Staff should be
granted e-mail facilities as a basic working tool. Where an office
has a LAN, an e-mail account should be given to each staff member on
the LAN.
E-mail empowers staff and
bypasses traditional hierarchical structures and it generally
defeats the purpose of e-mail to have it cleared prior to release
from the office. Staff must observe guidelines on authorized and
appropriate use of e-mail without further control before sending
individual messages. An office may specify some types of messages to
some interlocutors which require clearance of
content.
Staff are given e-mail
privileges for UNICEF business purposes. Staff are absolutely not to
use e-mail for any personal commercial purpose. Since the cost of
individual e-mail is generally extremely low (i.e. few cents a
message), then it is generally not cost effective to institute
controls and attempt to collect costs from staff for personal use of
e-mail. Staff should be advised not to abuse this privilege and keep
personal use of e-mail to very low volumes.
Staff should be held accountable for unauthorized and
inappropriate use of e-mail on a post factum
basis.
Appropriate uses of
e-mail
E-mail is the preferred
form of communication for almost all day to day internal
message-based communications. It is far less expensive than other
forms of Messaging and is more direct. Exceptions to this principle
are mentioned below. Even though most offices now have e-mail
connectivity, fax traffic worldwide is increasing. Office should
take steps to replace inter-office fax communication with less
expensive and more flexible e-mail except if an image copy of a
document is involved.
Communications
involving financial/contractual or legal commitments on the part of
the organization to third parties require authorized signatures
which at this time must continue to be applied to paper. These
communications should constitute a very small minority of all office
messages.
In order to avoid message
congestion, staff should be judicious in cc. of e-mail and when
responding to a message should not automatically respond to all
those originally cc.ed.
Messages
broadcast to all staff should be used very rarely again to avoid
message congestion. Every office should establish e-mail bulletin
boards so that staff may post special interest messages and
establish a process of administration of such bulletin boards
including elimination of messages after a period of
time.
E-mail is often a more informal
means of Messaging than traditional alternatives. However, staff
should be mindful of the need to be polite, avoid abusive or
insulting language and generally comport themselves correctly in the
content of their e-mail messages. For courtesy and clarity,
inter-office e-mail messages should always end with the name and
office of the correspondent. This practice can also avoid confusion
with forwarded e-mails.
All offices
should now use e-mail to attach their regular submission of GFSS
transactional data to headquarters (Reference CF/AI/96-001 Guideline
for Data Exchange using E-mail). This reduces the lags of recording
office data in headquarters systems and enables more timely
reconciliation of accounts between HQ and offices. The great
majority of offices now have e-mail capability, and if they have not
already done so, should plan to implement this electronic
transmission of GFSS data by 31 December 1996. E-mail will be the
means by which Programme Manager System (ProMs) transmits data
between offices.
For further details
on e-mail etiquette, refer to CF/IC/1996-017 “A Guideline on Using
cc:mail” issued February 1996. IRM Office will continue to issue its
e-mail tips bulletins to each office. Offices should integrate these
guidelines into the office training plan.
Security
Each
office should have an appointed security administrator for
electronic systems; this will normally be the IRM Officer for those
offices having such a function.
The
security administrator will provide staff with e-mail access by
issuing them an id and password. The password must be shared with
other staff and staff are asked to change their passwords at least
every quarter.
Filing
At present,
e-mail is not universally recognized as a statutory record of the
message. Thus messages that need to be retained for official record
or archive purposes should be printed out and filed in the office
record filing system. Such messages include policy, procedural or
decision making related matters. As noted above, messages involving
financial or legal commitments on behalf of the organization should
be conveyed in paper with an authorized signature. These should
represent a very small proportion of all
messages.
For the time being, cc:mail
electronic folders and message logs are considered as part of the
Personal Information Management environment of staff and do not
constitute the official records of the organization. This is likely
to change in the future as technological possibilities
allow.
Office e-mail needs
administration to ensure that the volume of messages does not lead
to large and expensive storage requirements and a slow down in
performance. Offices should formulate a process to periodically
delete messages in Inbox or Transmission Log. Staff should therefore
ensure that they file messages they wish to retain in their current
cc:mail into folders. Staff can also archive to their PC hard drives
the contents of Transmission Logs that they wish to
retain.
When out of
office
Offices are encouraged to
provide staff with laptops and cc:mobile access to e-mail while away
from the office where work needs make this useful and within budget
limitations.
When staff are away from
the office and do not pick up their e-mail by means of cc:mobile,
then they must make arrangements to pick up important messages in
their absence. Until cc:mail upgrades allow automatic routing of
messages to another staff member, it is necessary to arrange for
secretaries/assistants to log on to the absent staff member’s
cc:mail and review and route important messages for action by
another staff member. In such cases, staff members should change
their passwords for this purpose and a strong element of trust in
the secretaries/assistants is
implied. |
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