Another story about the perils of a misdirected email sent off by the CEO of a company.  This time Spirit Airlines and CEO Ben Baldanza are in the cross hairs.  Here’s the story from the Orlando Sentinel (via WallStreetFighter).

After getting the e-mail on his BlackBerry, Spirit CEO Ben Baldanza
accidentally hit "reply all" when responding to fellow executives and sent his
response back to the couple.

"Please respond, Pasquale, but we owe him nothing as far as I’m concerned,"
Baldanza wrote. "Let him tell the world how bad we are. He’s never flown us
before anyway and will be back when we save him a penny."

Ooops…

I’m not taking sides in this dispute as I think the couple’s demand for reimbursement of hotel, parking, and concert tickets in addition to airfare is a bit absurd.  Nonetheless, this episode illustrates the risk posed by quick email responses from a handheld without any type of safeguard in place. 

A simple confirm with sender rule designed to detect and confirm reply to all responses (especially those headed outside the company) could have avoided this.

Piling on here but think this is pretty entertaining and gets at the core of what we have been talking about for some time concerning separating high-value and low-value email especially as it is archived in the enterprise.  "Bacn" is basically the email that you get that you want but don’t value highly – alerts, statements, order confirmations.  This stuff adds up fast and we have seen it easily measure 20-30% of total email traffic on any given day.  Here’s a definition put forth via Cnet that calls it the "middle class of email" and here’s an entry that claims video of the "birth" of the term – both humorous and sad.

Regardless of what it is called, it is pervasive inside corporate networks.  Here’s Bradley’s take.

Also, this was a good excuse to promote one of my favorite Southern gems – Piggly Wiggly.  If you see one, stop in and get a t-shirt (or order one on-line).

In order to correct a problem, you must understand what is causing it.  There is no dispute or disagreement about corporate email being a "broken" tool/process/technology.  The question is – what can you realistically do about it incorporating all the elements previously discussed here including habits, regulations, laws, and existing processes?  We’ll get to that.  For now, here is a way to frame the problem on two levels – Risk & Operations.

Risk

Targeting the risk aspects of email proactively has close parallels to why you have insurance.  You only need it if something happens.  Well, just as cars run into each other every day, your employees are doing things every day to that expose your firm to risk and possibly liability.  The "something" is happening!  It may not always escalate to an incident/investigation/lawsuit, but it does have real business impact.  Burying your head in the sand or deciding to address it after it happens is a less than prudent way to handle it.

Liability – every email sent is a date/time stamped record of activity and often get labeled as "smoking gun" emails because of the conclusive and indisputable truth they convey.

Retrieval headaches & discovery pain – firms struggle with finding it all in every nook and cranny as well as proving that their copy is authentic.  "We don’t have that one" is a plausible defense and puts the other party in the position of proving the one they have is real, authentic, and not altered/created to prove their case.

Operations

Email is a true business process tool as its flexibility and ease of use underpin every major business process in your company.  From how you invoice customers to how you negotiate contracts.  That means a lot of email every day from a lot of people.  Here’s the problem – it is losing its effectiveness because the meaningful stuff is being drowned out by the noise.

Volume and increasing recipient immunity – volume is growing at 20-30% CAGR and, as Malcolm Gladwell points out, we are building immunity to it.  There are things banging around your email network every day that don’t need to be there.  Go check your fancy copier/fax system – it sends email alerts when the toner is low.  Or find out the favored tool to check network performance.  My guess is that huge volumes of emails are sent to see how the network is performing.

Effectiveness and use as a direct communication substitute – it’s easier to send a message with capital letters and exclamation points than it is to have a face-to-face confrontation.  I use to work with a guy like this and some of his email rants were masterpieces but he would fold like a spanked puppy in a face-to-face encounter.  Email is not a substitute for conversation and definitely not a place for confrontation (see point on smoking gun above).

Ok great.  So now I have stated the problem.  I fundamentally believe that it is intellectually lazy to state a problem without being prepared with a suggested solution (reference post on "Spot it, Got it" for details). 

Stay tuned…

There are a variety of business, legal, regulatory, and even cultural issues associated with taking a proactive stance on email and addressing the risk that it brings to an organization.  We work with a variety of companies and although there are certainly industry and even company-specific nuances, a minimum threshold approach to regaining control over email applies.  So to really boil this down to basics, here is what you can do tomorrow (or even today) to not only mitigate risk but take real cost out of the messaging infrastructure.

1.  Perform an audit of your traffic to see what is really going on

Whether you use a company like MessageGate or perform this analysis yourself, take a look at what is going on and who/what sends and receives the most of what kinds of messages.  The results are eye opening and low hanging fruit abundant.

2.  Implement attachment parking

The 50% of your email volume that is MS Office files can be removed from the stream by stripping the attachment and replacing it with a hyperlink to a certain file share or even MS Sharepoint.  Doing this for internal traffic alone will significantly reduce server load, duplicate attachments floating around, and archive strain.  No workflow disruption, no end-user changes, and minimal technology (you probably already own Sharepoint even if you aren’t actively using it….yet)

3.  Implement end-user self-review for three specific things:

a.  Entertainment files over 70k (image, audio, video files) sent internally or externally
b.  SSNs being sent externally either in text or attachment(s)
c.  Inappropriate language internally and externally

The ONLY way to fix these organic business processes (and bad habits) is to increase end-user awareness.  The best way to do that is not through a training seminar or "email awareness email" but a real-time corrective response that the sender can control.  Want to send that spreadsheet full of SSNs outside the company?  Fine, you can override the warning but be ready with an explanation should the Privacy/Compliance folks coming knocking.  Want to go a step further?  Automatically encrypt an email containing an SSN as it is sent removing the the dependency on the end-user to use a tool other than their mail client.

Do these three things and you will see immediate cost and risk reductions without having to come up with a master solution to the "email problem." 

MessageGate released a podcast yesterday of a conversation I had with Brian Babineau of Enterprise Strategy Group.  Brian is a really great guy covering the broad topic of information management and ESG is a great firm to work with – if they cover your space, invest in a relationship with them.  They are more approachable and informed than many of the others out there.

Here’s the audio of our conversation where we focus on what to do now to begin to regain control over corporate email while not impeding or disrupting the current flow of business.

Download esg_messagegate_podcast.mp3

AOL just released their 3rd annual "email addiction" survey and it is a pretty disturbing commentary.  Here’s the press release on it and a post by Jason Caplain that brought it to my attention.  Couple of interesting things in the data including the emphasis on access to email via portable devices (picking up on the mobile theme here?)and that Washington, DC is the most addicted city (Seattle came in 7th).  As a counterpoint to this is an article in the UK’s Independent on "the end of email" that features alternatives including enterprise wiki company Socialtext.

Updated:

I did not give proper coverage (thanks Michael) to the fact that my former home town of Atlanta came in an impressive #2 on this survey.  Thanks to those of your that check you email incessantly in the A-T-L.

This is a bit long but worth watching about how to regain control of your life from email.  Inbox Zero is a preso by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders at a Google company lunch and learn.  A lot of pretty elementary stuff in here about "how" to work and not being a slave to your email…but also some good nuggets and perspectives.  Here’s the five things according to Merlin:

1. Delete (Archive)
2. Delegate
3. Respond
4. Defer
5. Do

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=973149761529535925&hl=en

Updated:
So now I listened to all the Q&A and find it a bit comical.  Here’s a company that is the anti everything being held hostage by email.  Come on…"500 emails per day" or "physical  pain" from having to open emails?  Companies that grow too fast get really inefficient and the recent discussion about hiring too much in their last earnings call comes through loud and clear here.  Too many people with not enough to do end up sending a lot of emails…

This is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen so I of course wanted to share it.  TechCrunch covered these guys today and their approach to bringing your inbox to life via over-hyped and creepy Second Life.  Innovation at its finest…

Looks like NJ Governor Jon Corzine has gone cold turkey.  Although not on the cutting edge of technology adoption as this NY Times story describes, he does concede “It’ll slow processes down” and “We’ll just have to find another way to do it.”  The reasoning?  Looks like the Gov doesn’t want certain emails disclosed he exchanged with a former "companion" (via Freakonomics) so he has decided to abandon the medium all together.  I suppose he falls into the "the costs outweigh the benefits" camp on the email debate. 

"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."