Some 2.7 trillion e-mails will have been sent by people around the world by the end of this year alone. If you feel the majority of them are ending up in your in-box, you're not the only one. E-mail fatigue has become a common business complaint. Increasingly, co-workers seem to figure there's no point in walking 10 feet to a colleague's desk and having a brief conversation when a 300-word e-mail mini-essay will do. —"Pop guide to beating e-mail fatigue," The Irish Times, December 12, 1997
E-mail is perhaps the biggest killer application in recent technology history. We all need e-mail as part of our day-to-day work lives. However, many, many organizations have come to rely too heavily on e-mail. This over reliance has come at the expense of employee productivity and intellectual property.
The Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) reports that as much as 75 percent of most companies’ intellectual property is contained in the messages and attachments they send through their e-mail systems (source: Message Therapy, CIO Magazine, January, 2005).
The problem is that far too many organizations use e-mail as the principal knowledge repository and storage system. The risks to relying too much on e-mail (and other systems such as shared drives) for information storage are well known:
Ø Email is an inefficient document sharing system
Ø With no metadata or search, shared drives become un-navigable
Ø 3rd party services are usually owned by the individual not the company
According to Seth Gottlieb, the Content Management and Collaboration Lead at Optaros, “a company's success in content management is inversely proportional to the amount of information that is exchanged over email.” In other words, the more e-mail an organization has, the more e-mail undermines the organization’s ability to manage content (particularly on the enterprise intranet).
A new study on e-mail suggests that e-mail has become a hindrance to many organizations. E-Mail Management: An Oxymoron? written by John Mancini, President of AIIM, the enterprise association on content management, states that a casual approach to e-mail management presents “significant risks” including major costs, significant litigation, and a drag on key processes. E-mail management including a strategy and processes for archiving, retention, and lifecycle management of enterprise e-mail.
The study culminates a great deal of analysis including a survey of more than 1000 e-mail managers (mostly IT managers and executives, and records and document management specialists).
Other study findings:
Ø Nearly half those respondents (44%) spend more than 30% of their work activity on e-mail related activity.
Ø Only 25% of respondents have implemented an e-mail management strategy with most organizations leaving e-mail management up to individual employees (with little or no guidance)
Ø 23% of respondents in large size organizations (1000 employees or more) have had to turn over e-mail as part of a legal or internal investigation
E-mail management strategies and technologies can certainly help but are not the sole answers to the e-mail problem. Better knowledge management would certainly help (see The lost meaning of knowledge management). Also helping overcome e-mail fatigue at leading organizations are effective policies on e-mail use and the use of social media such as wikis and blogs.
Social media
If managed properly, the use of social media tools such as blogs and wikis can reduce e-mail volumes by as much as 30%.
While blogs, wikis and other social media such as podcasts and social networking sites have taken the intranet by storm, these tools have not found the same level of success on the intranet. A recent CIO survey found that only 18% of organizations have deployed blogs, and only 13% have deployed wikis. This is changing however. More than 40% are testing, piloting or evaluating blog and wiki applications at the time of the survey.
Furthermore, as a new generation of employees enter the workforce, more employees will begin to demand social media tools such as social networking sites. For example, MySpace grew by 609% in one year, from just under 3.5 million members in October 2004 to over 24 million in 2005.
Here are some important statistics on our future employees (fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds):
Ø average nearly 6 1/2 hours a day watching TV, playing video games, and surfing the Net
Ø A quarter of that time, they're multitasking.
Ø The biggest increase: computer use for activities such as social networking, which has soared nearly threefold since 2000, to 1 hour and 22 minutes a day on average (Kaiser Family Foundation survey).
ON A PERSONAL NOTE: Many thanks to those sending notes of concern regarding the water situation in
I understand the Canadian Football League Championship was broadcast across the globe… did anyone watch? How about that Carl Kidd dive over the top to stop
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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media