Remember when the family fridge played a vital role in communications. In our household, all vital messages ended up on the fridge door. Doctors' appointments, birthday reminders, notes to each other, bills to be paid, pretty much everything ended up on the fridge door. In fact the fridge was filing cabinet, to do list, calendar, and reminder system for the family and messages included a lot more than just the odd note. Messages on the fridge included everything from shopping lists to budgets and tuck-shop rosters to receipts.

Messaging in business includes much the same sort of documents. More than just "while you were out" phone messages, business messaging includes all manner of communications. Purchase orders, receipts, invoices, commitments to do things, reminders, and prompts are all "messages" whether they be letters, phone calls, faxes or and emails and sms messages. When you view messaging as this wide raft of communications, in and out, sent and received, the need to be in control of messaging is readily apparent. Traditionally, we have relied on filing cabinets to store and organize our written communications and more or less considered everything else as secondary. My first boss, 30 years ago, would thunder "If it’s not in writing, it doesn’t count" – "if its not in the file, it never happened". The invoice and receipt book carbons and the filing cabinet were pretty much the totality of business messaging that he acknowledged. Over the last 30 years, many things have changed, but for a lot of companies the filing cabinet is still the centerpiece of corporate messaging. For some companies however, electronic messaging has given them huge competitive advantage. Deals are done, orders are placed, payment is made and receipts are issued without a piece of paper ever making the filing cabinet. For instance, think of buying an airfare on-line with Virgin Blue. It is fast, efficient and economical for both the traveler and the airline but not a single piece of paper is created – until perhaps you print out the emailed ticket. But with check-in via credit card swipe now – you don’t even need that. And I predict we are going to do a lot more business this way – not because we want to, but because we will have to in order to remain competitive. Messaging – in all its forms – is going to become more electronic, more complex to manage, more time critical and the number one task will be managing corporate messaging.

Right now, many firms have great difficulty in managing the simplest electronic messaging – email. Because email began life as an individualized personal service, many firms have not managed to adequately deal with controls on the receipt, collection, preservation and storage of email. Some firms (probably Microsoft most prominently) have come to grief for not having good policies in place regarding what email is kept and archived and what is prudently deleted. What emails form part of the legal binding communications of the firm and what is personal chatter?

There are some excellent "groupware" software solutions that enforce some discipline and corporate rules over email and interested managers should investigate some of the features of products like Microsoft Exchange and Outlook or the Lotus Notes suite just to name a couple.

Smaller businesses in particular often get poor product advice because they rely heavily on the support they get from their vendors who are often motivated by profit margin and skill set rather than on corporate strategic advantage. Sometimes advice really is worth what you pay for it.

What the future might hold

I think it is inevitable that all businesses will do more and more business without the traditional comfort of "having it in writing". Verbal orders, electronic payments, emailed amendments to contract and even SMS deals will be commonplace. All of these "messages" need to be managed as they form the contractual basis on which we conduct our business.

Consolidated messaging must become standard practice so that all the varied ways we communicate business details are collected and organized, stored, and able to be retrieved on demand. Email in particular, with its casual conversational style is a source of concern. Imagine going though a hostile divorce where your spouse has a full written history of every word you had ever said. "Darling, I love you and I will give you the world! … Everything I have is yours". The transition to electronic messaging creates long written histories. This creates the possibility of legal contracts being created and amended on the fly by every salesperson, secretary or dispatch clerk in your organization. And the salesperson who says "The cheque is in the mail" may create an even more daunting legal prospect than that mythical divorce above if their every utterance becomes part of the binding written history of a transaction.

It may not yet be the Orwellian brave new world, but prudent managers are worrying about it already. And even though you can buy an Internet fridge at most retailers, it won’t help this time.

Careful planning and timely execution of the receipt, collection, storage and retrieval of messages is a corporate survival necessity.