Prevent Human Error in Business Communications

Let’s not get too nostalgic for human error just yet, especially when it comes to managing sensitive email and documents.

Armand the Armadillo, here again, your RPost product evangelist. With all this talk of AI creating “perfect” essays, playlists that “perfectly” divine what songs you will want to hear, and genetic tests that can “near perfectly” discern who your ancestors were, it makes me a little nostalgic for good-ole-human imperfection. It’s this imperfection that makes life interesting and human beings, well, human.

One thing that struck me as I watched the final minutes wind down in Sunday’s Buffalo Bills game, was this concept of “human error.” Being an Armadillo, I don’t have firsthand knowledge of this notion; although I do see my human friends flounder with errors, slip on ice, mis-send email… Take the final field goal attempt by the Bill’s kicker. Human error. Unfortunate for Bills fans like me, favorable for those Chiefs followers.

Imperfection in the realm of football is one of the most exciting aspects of the game. How many fortunes turn on a dime because of a fumble, blocked punt, or the err… missed field goal that could have easily been made. Imperfection has led to some of the greatest works of art and music. Imagine if Led Zeppelin’s 2nd album was tweaked to perfection? You would lose that raw, unvarnished sound that would come to define the band’s entire persona.

But let’s not get too nostalgic for human error just yet, especially when it comes to managing sensitive email and documents. Unlike art, music, and sports, there really can be no room for error when it comes to securing your company’s most sensitive information. At one recent Florida Bar CLE technology webinar, we asked how many lawyers had mis-sent a sensitive document to the wrong party by email. In the poll, 75% of those polled had indicated that they “knew of someone” who had sent a sensitive document to the wrong person. 

When we asked the same question among financial services professionals, two thirds said they had made that mistake. The fact remains that some forms of imperfection are not worth having any nostalgia over and can cost careers and untold sums of money. 

The good news is that RPost has built a way to deal with the kind of human error that nobody wants. If you send an attachment to an email through the RMail Gateway (outbound email filters) configured to convert it into an RDocs format or send it as an RDocs rights protected file, viewing access to the file can be killed even after delivery. It’s like having a remote control on your delivered documents. (Put another way, how many kickers would like to have a similar tool for their missed field goals!)

Know More: Document Control

Further, once the file is remote-control killed, the (mis)sending organization can retain forensic evidence that, even though there was a mistake or a leak, no one viewed the leaked content before it was killed out in the ether, and therefore there is evidence of a non-breach… a non-reportable human error!

As the RPost product evangelist, I’m here to help you get more information and detail about these great technology innovations. Click to learn more about RDocs or read about the send, unsend and mis-sent kill options; just contact us to arrange a demo, or just buy it online by shopping now. 

It’s fine to be nostalgic for human error at a time when machine learning and AI are “perfecting” so much of what we used to do, but maybe it really is best to keep the all-too-human imperfection out of one’s business communications.

You might also like