The rising prevalence of freemail is driving change across the enterprise email market. And the simple fact is that a single user  identity as opposed to a single corporate identity may provide the best long-term solution for email management both within and outside the public sector. When it comes to "corporate email accounts" there are some people that need it and some that don't.  With corporates beginning to embrace a corporate and non-corporate mail strategy, governments should look to leverage a high-impact approach that encompasses a mandated generic domain standard (i.e. @government.gov.au) for those who need corporate email, and freemail (@hotmail, @gmail, @yahoo etc) for those that don't. 

Whereas email used to be easy when it was simply POP, there is now a significant cost to managing email changes in any organisation. For governments, that cost is considerable because while many public servants remain in the service for a lifetime, they actually move around from agency to agency, cluster to cluster and often jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Each move often requires a change and that change most often involves a new email identity.

For many workers within the public service email is simply used by management as a broadcast tool by which they receive notifications. As such, many "service" or "transient" workers such as those working in service centres with shared terminals probably don't require access to a corporate account. As highlighted in Australian Enterprise Email Market why should Centrelink continue to provide corporate accounts to thousands of customer service centre staff or temporary employees and deal with the policy and privacy issues which are generated by corporate email account management?

The clearest benefit for such a policy is undoubtedly the change cost which could be initially costed by calculating the savings realisation of a 3-yearly machinery of government change due to election cycles; and then multiplied from there. Other benefits though are the reduction in "aliasing" resulting in historical change management of naming structures of agencies and, departments, and the embracing of other more efficient technologies other than email to to deliver one-way broadcasts to all staff (RSS, twitter etc, etc, etc). SPAM management and threat reduction would also come into play as would the need to employ less network access control strategies and technology to provide access away from work for all employees.

 According to Pew Internet and American Life Project, 50% of employed email users say they check their work-related email on the weekends. Fully 22% say that they check their work email accounts "often" during weekend hours, compared with 16% who reported the same in 2002.  Furthermore 46% of employed email users say they check email when they have to take a sick day; 25% say they do so "often." 34% of employed email users say they will at least occasionally check their email while on vacation; 11% say they do so "often."

At present there are several notable impediments that would need to be explored before a business case could be established to implement our first policy suggestion. Firstly, most public sector and government agencies currently block freemail. Insurrmountable? No, because that other bizarre hybrid beast the university sector does not. Similarly, difficulties of trust exist at both a cultural and authentication level; directory management policies would need revisiting, and of course the challenge of name clashes though we must recognise that this applies as readily to generic domain standards (i.e. @government.gov.au) as it does for freemail standards(@hotmail, @gmail, @yahoo etc).

But ultimately this policy initiative deserves a look because it meets the "good policy" criteria of saving money and improving service delivery and efficiency. Email became the the killer application when there existed no alternatives to effective and fast collaborative and communication strategy. It was the lowest common demoninator. That is no longer the case.  Paring off the unnecessary management of non-essential corporate users to a freemail provider, as has been the case with the management of students within the education system,  and QANTAS' flight attendants to give two examples, should very soon become a basic rationalisation policy for the wider public sector.