Abstract: E-mail is at the nexus of two paradoxes: It has become simultaneously mission critical to the organization and personally irritating to your users. At the same time, it's been a great success for the IS/IT professionals, but the jury's still out among the rest of the organization. Some data from a study we did for one of our clients tells one company's tale: They're wasting people-years, a few seconds at a time. And, there are specific steps you can take to dramatically improve e-mail effectiveness and help end-users be happier.
E-mail raises the memo to the immediacy of voice mail.
E-mail makes facsimile work without going through paper.
E-mail supplants voice mail with a written record.
E-mail allows communication of rich documents (files) and simple text.
E-mail increases the ability for people to misinterpret messages.
E-mail makes it easy for people to send too much to too many.
E-mail is being drowned in unsolicited message (aka "Spam").
How can users report that e-mail is both mission critical and personally-irritating? Because they report on different e-mail messages: Many messages are, indeed, critical and important. At the same time, there are other messages that should never have been sent to this correspondent in the first time, and it takes time to sort them out.
There are lots of features that make e-mail mission-critical. These empower people to do things that used to be a lot harder, and it enables the increasingly mobile or distant professional to remain in touch. At the same time, like any new technology, e-mail makes it easy for people to misuse and abuse it, leading to additional complications and dissatisfaction. The issue is simple: How to we retain all those benefits of e-mail, while reducing the disadvantages and dissatisfactions? Frankly, the technology's pretty sound; the leverage is in human behavior, and the culture your organization has established around e-mail.
In most cases, the IS/IT budget is driven by some arbitrary cost numbers the have been negotiated between management and the information professionals. As a consequence, the technical people responsible for selecting and deploying e-mail are driven by "$/seat" numbers. Unfortunately for the larger organization, that seldom translates into bottom-line benefits. The goal of e-mail has to be to make the organization richer and more responsive to changing environments; if it can achieve that, it's more than mere technology, it's a management tool.
In all too many cases, the technology selection is made on the wrong principles: What's easy to install and administer, rather than what will have the biggest impact on the organization's ability to compete, to grow, to become a better place to work. As a consequence, the goal becomes "get e-mail on everybody's desk," instead of "get e-mail on everybody's desk and make it a tool for getting more done, faster, better and cheaper." All too often, I talk with senior IT management who don't consider this their responsibility. But, if not theirs, who's is it? Should the CEO be concerned with how technology enriches the organization? Ask the CEO and she'll tell you, "That why I hired the CIO." It's a perpetual battle.