Ironing the Wrinkles Out of E-Mail

hen he convened the Chief Information Officers Council in 1996, John Koskinen of the Office of Management and Budget knew the council would have to do much of its business electronically. The members were busy people who couldn't attend lots of meetings, but they had the tools of modern information technology at their disposal.

Koskinen, then deputy OMB director for management, got a surprise. It turned out only half the major federal agencies' CIOs had electronic mail that would reach outside their agencies. Installing or upgrading Internet gateways for the remaining 15 or so CIOs kept a squad of General Services Administration employees busy for a couple months.

Just two years later, this story has a quaint flavor, like a recollection of your family's first black-and-white television set. Nearly every agency now has Internet mail connections, and a lot of business gets done via e-mail. For example, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna E. Shalala routinely sends e-mail messages to the department's 55,000 employees, at considerably less expense than when similar communiqués were sent on paper.

But e-mail communications across agency boundaries remain far from frustration-free, because of a lack of industry standards and the newness of the technology.

Anyone who exchanges e-mail with people outside his organization has encountered a garbled or missing attachment. "All of our users are so frustrated by the inability to read attachments on e-mail," says Anne Thomson Reed, chief information officer at the Agriculture Department and chair of the CIO Council's interoperability committee.

Although it's rarer now, messages sometimes disappear in cyberspace. And when you send a message, you cannot be confident it will be delivered promptly. Often the recipient will get it within minutes, but sometimes delivery takes hours or even days.

All these problems keep e-mail out of a category that's been labeled "business-class communication." To become the primary medium for transacting important business, e-mail must become more secure, reliable and easy to use. "It's become part of the strategic operating environment for many agencies," says Keith Thurston, a GSA information technology expert. Thurston is working with a committee established by the CIO Council to iron out interoperability wrinkles and define a shared architecture for government systems. Last fall the committee decided to tackle e-mail problems as part of its larger mission.

It seemed like a set of problems that could be resolved quickly and would yield operational benefits.

21st Century Postmasters

But the e-mail problems have proved more intractable than expected. The solutions lie in a variety of areas, including user education, interagency coordination and improvement in the commercial products that have difficulty digesting each other's output. The CIO Council now has encouraged the formation of a Federal E-mail Postmasters Council, with representatives from more than two dozen agencies.

A CIO Council survey of postmasters at large agencies found more than a dozen e-mail systems in use early this year. Notes and cc:Mail from Lotus Development Corp. and MS-Mail and Exchange from Microsoft Corp. were the products most commonly reported in use. But the most striking finding was the diversity of the responses.

Only four of the 20 agencies responding had agencywide directories, and at least five incompatible kinds of directories were in use at the 20 agencies. The upshot: Most federal employees have difficulty obtaining the e-mail address of a co-worker in the same agency, much less someone in another agency. Most large agencies are planning to build agencywide directories, according to Jack Finley, who heads GSA's Center for Electronic Messaging Technologies. Some already have posted these directories on their World Wide Web sites.

The postmasters identified problems with e-mail attachments and conflicting encoding standards as their highest-priority problems, along with e-mail delivery service expectations. The first two issues are closely related, because they stem from lack of consensus about technical standards for e-mail.

In some cases, agencies can ameliorate problems by upgrading gateways through which their mail passes to and from the Internet. But the problems will be fully resolved only when the industry commits to uniform standards for e-mail software and agencies install only standards-compliant products.

As for e-mail delivery service, it seems to be improving as the technology matures. But no simple means of guaranteeing prompt delivery, or non-delivery notification, is in sight. Some of the delivery snafus are caused by users who send extra-large files to each other (or worse, to large mailing lists) or subscribe to mailing lists that generate large volumes of messages. These clog the mail pipelines.

Delays also are caused by extra-secure mail gateways at organizations such as the White House and the Justice Department. These gateways scan mail for viruses, so-called "logic bombs" and other dangerous contents. One Justice official tells people outside the agency not to send her e-mail unless they can abide delays of a day or more. Taking a server off-line for maintenance also delays e-mail.

Sometimes, agencies are using on a large scale e-mail software designed for use by an organization the size of a division or bureau, GSA's Thurston says. Other agencies have pieced together e-mail systems from different vendors, and the patches affect operations.

In the future, e-mail systems-possibly with the Defense Message System in the vanguard-will be equipped to give priority passage to urgent messages, report to the sender when the message was delivered and/or opened, and notify the sender if the message cannot be delivered. For now, users learn to live with a degree of uncertainty and use other means, such as fax or overnight mail, when they want to be sure the message gets through.

If every agency used the same package, these problems would be less noticeable. NASA, for example, has standardized on Microsoft Corp.'s Exchange mail server and Office applications suite, which has simplified issues such as e-mail communications and support.

But a governmentwide standard is not likely to happen soon, particularly because the Defense Department has chosen a set of e-mail standards different from those that are emerging as commercial standards. "I don't think industry wants the federal government to pick one e-mail package," Agriculture's Reed says, implying that it's an appealing notion. But even if federal agencies were to standardize on a single vendor's mail system, they would continue to have difficulty exchanging mail with outside organizations using other products.

Reed acknowledges that these problems are not limited to the federal environment. Corporations have similar e-mail headaches. "It's something that affects everybody," she says. She'd like to see all those customers making it clear to the software industry that users want the problems fixed. She says she's seeing signs of responsiveness in the industry. For example, better tools for managing and filtering message traffic are beginning to appear on the market.

Meanwhile, the CIO Council is tackling some of the operational issues. At its May meeting, the council was expected to endorse a standard policy on the maximum size of e-mail attachments. When the standard is implemented, the gateway servers will reject larger files attached to messages. The council was likely to fix the ceiling at 2.5 megabytes, about the size of a 49-slide PowerPoint presentation.

At the Center for Electronic Messaging Technologies, Finley is working on a governmentwide directory system that will allow all 6 million civilian and DoD e-mail users to find each others' e-mail addresses. This online white pages is likely to be maintained on many agency servers, with GSA coordination.

NPR Mandate

But what of the original National Performance Review recommendations on "Reengineering Through Information Technology," issued in September 1993? One of the 13 major recommendations called for the government to "plan, demonstrate and provide governmentwide electronic mail." Has it been achieved?

By and large, the answer seems to be yes, although there is not much of a plan in evidence for civilian agencies, and no one seems to be counting the haves and have-nots. Reed says the Agriculture Department is "not as connected as I'd like it to be," with some far-flung field offices still not hooked up to the Internet. In USDA and other agencies, some employees can dial into a service for their e-mail. At HHS, e-mail postmaster Mark Haven says "well over 90 percent" of the employees have e-mail service.

"We're getting to the point where people want to get beyond exchanging information and do actual transactions," GSA's Thurston says. In short, says HHS' Haven, "everyone counts on using it."