Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
My work now has Microsoft Lync, an instant messaging system intended for internal communications. It’s an alternative to inter-office mail, e-mail, fax, telephone or walking down the hall to talk to somebody at their desk.
Why do we need it another form of internal communication? E-mail is retained on servers which costs money, and retained e-mails are discoverable in lawsuits. Instant messages won’t tie up storage space on servers (which will save money) and won’t be discoverable in litigation.
Except . . . we’re government. EVERYTHING we do should be discoverable, that’s the point of Sunshine Laws. And if we don’t want to pay to store e-mail, then don’t store it – establish a retention policy and delete everything after a short time.
Joe Doakes
At my most recent employer, every Lync session started with a notice that *everything* you wrote and presented was being recorded.
But it wouldn’t astound me if Ramco used Lync to skirt the rules…
UHG uses Cisco Unified Personal Communicator as our internal IM. It also is recorded. The only thing that isn’t recorded is your actual voice communication, unless you are a call taker (this call may be monitored for quality and training purposes). Some of our call takers don’t have CUPC and you have to communicate with them via email or phone. If you are a call taker in UHG, the only thing that isn’t recorded is what you do in the bathroom.
We don’t have keystroke loggers, however. That would be a BIG HIPAA violation.
For a curiosity issue, I looked at MNPost’s site this weekend. I was surprised to see Ramsey County on the front page, listed as a sponsor. Government sponsoring media? Not how I want my tax dollars spent. The link goes to Ramco’s a to z recycling page, so I am sure that is the justification.
Isn’t it government types who constantly tell us that if we’re not doing anything wrong, we have nothing to fear? Sauce for the goose….
Since we are talking government here, and we should reasonably expect our government (and it’s employees) to be responsible for what they do and say, I would like to see more emphasis placed on making discoverable items more easily and quickly accessible than on shorter retention times.
I came across this post in search of an answer to a predicament:
In filing a lawsuit against the Assister Resource Center of MNSure, I was told nothing could be done to retrieve Lync conversations that would serve as the primary evidence in my case.
Is this true? Employees could be planning government heists or violating HIPPA left and right, and NOTHING can be done to retrieve evidential internal conversations?