"Here’s where e-mail’s socialism turns from strength to weakness: It doesn’t matter if the message comes from a spammer hawking Viagra, your wife asking you to pick up some wine, your boss telling the company that Monday is a holiday, or a client asking for a meeting at his office at 11 a.m. In today’s inboxes, all e-mail messages are equal."

Once you get under the hood of corporate email, you see something that is both amazing and at the same time terrifying.  Email is used (and misused) for just about everything and the technologies that power it and policies that govern it are barely keeping up if at all.  There is no shortage of email bashing out there including this recent NY Times piece.  I don’t disagree that email is both our best friend and worst enemy in the workplace – and can even be a source of stress (via Freakonomics Blog), but the question remains of what to do about it.

Om Malik put an article out entitled "Why we hate e-mail" that gets at the core of the matter and provides some suggestions for how to fix it.  The quotes in this post are from that article.  Some of his observations are consistent with our focus on understanding the difference between high-value correspondence and low-value correspondence.  Regardless of why you need to separate it – for better Inbox management, for archiving efficiency, for improved supervision, etc. being able to segment communications based on their importance or relevance to you is essential as volumes grow and methods evolve beyond email.  Om’s article offers up a chart by the Radicati Group on average emails sent/received per day putting the number around 130 in 2007 and growing from there.

I think these are a bit high as our own research and customer work has shown this number to be closer to 50 per employee per day.  Here’s the breakdown based on MessageGate analysis:

Inbound:    13.5      
Outbound:    9      
Internal:    30      
Total email per day per employee:    52.5    

Volume is certainly growing and there are no signs of the corporate dependency on email subsiding anytime soon.  The best approach?  Embrace it and put technologies in place to control/improve/manage it including the ability to differentiate between email that matters and email noise.  Listen to an interview with me on this topic here.

"E-mail ought to be reinvented to meet the needs of our always-connected lives."

This is a great article from CNET on enterprise software and how email fits into workflow.  It never ceases to amaze me how dependent companies are on email to support and execute core business processes and also how this seems to come as a surprise when they take a hard look at messaging activity and patterns (we do this for customers with our MAPs).  Enterprise software companies have automated core business processes through ERP, CRM, SFA, etc. type applications and end-users use email to serve as the de facto integration broker among them. 

It struck both of us that the problem with enterprise software is that it tends to forget how people actually work. Things like CRM, ECM, etc., tend to require users to change their normal behavior to fit the application. As a result, they tend to not get used, or at least not unless someone threatens to withhold compensation.

These enterprise systems take a backseat to email.  Want to find the most recent account status?  Check email, not the sales force automation system.  Want to know where goods are in a supply chain?  Check the Excel spreadsheet attached to an email from your supplier, not the supply chain management system.

E-mail becomes the easiest route to group participation, because few have to be goaded into creating and sending email, and because it should be possible to capture the information contained within that email to inform CRM, ERP, etc. systems.

The article discusses the need to make the mail client the primary point of interface as that is where people spend most of their day anyway.  Reminded me of the feedback from the compliance folks at the securities firms where in order to conduct NASD 3010 mandated surveillance they wanted the interface to "look like Outlook."