Email Governance: Are Companies in Financial Industries More Mature?

Emails have drastically changed the way companies and employees communicate. Some Emails are business-relevant and have to be kept for documentation, external and internal audits, and for legal evidence. Many companies defined rules for handling Emails to comply with external and internal requirements. In this paper we describe indicators for good Email practices and develop a maturity model by weighting these indicators. We sent questionnaires concerning Email policies to the largest German and Swiss companies. The resulting data set was used to analyze whether there are significant differences in the maturity of Email governance between companies belonging to the financial industries and other companies. For many indicators we found that companies belonging to the financial industries look more mature from a descriptive point of view, some differences are also statistically significant. After computing aggregate maturity scores we found a highly significant difference between the two groups of companies.