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."

There are few phrases that are buzzing about more today than "social networking."  Getting past questions of who has the time or inclination to meet on-line, what is being discussed is a way to connect, share, and communicate on an individual or a group basis electronically (on-line).  So, this got me to thinking – isn’t this what email does already?  Yes, I know there are big differences between the popular site du jour (Facebook et al) and sending emails, but fundamentally aren’t we talking about the same thing? 

From our collective friends at Wikipedia, here is the definition of a social network:

"A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of relations…"

Sounds like email to me, but I have a bit of bias here.

Here’s a few quick points on my thinking:

1.  It is active, not passive

A network is only as valuable as your use of it.  Look at your Sent Items – this is your social network and it includes both personal relationships as well as business relationships.  The Inbox is also indicative of this, but there is no real barrier to someone sending you an email however, as the sender, you are pushing a connection to someone you have or aspire to have a relationship with.  Also, you probably have many more Contacts than you have active relationships as indicated by your Sent Items/Inbox.

2.  Used ubiquitously

No need for viral marketing campaigns or user adoption curves here.  Everyone knows what email is and how to use it.  More importanly, they already are.  Regardless of your interface (client or browser), you know how to compose, send, and read an email.  You can also share pictures, music, and other types of files with the click of a button.

3.  Growing

As Mark Twain stated "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."  The same can be said of email in that regardless of how antiquated/bad/inefficient it is, it is growing in usage both in terms of people and overall volume.  One of the recent stats I saw from Radicati Group put the number of email users at over a billion sending some 50 billion emails per day (this subtracts out the ~70% or so that are spam/virus). 

4.  Dependable

When you send it and it does not bounce back, you are confident the recipient got it.   Whether it has been read or not is another question, but you have confidence that the system delivered your message.

No doubt that there are not only new ways to interact on-line but new habits being brought to the workplace by the next generation of workers.  It is possible that these new approaches will take the personal out of email leaving it behind to focuses on business purposes (moving files, broadcast messages, formal customer/partner communication, etc.).  But rather than build entirely new ways for people to communicate and connect, why not leverage how they are already doing so?

I often start reading books on planes and don’t quite finish leading to lots of books that I am in the process of reading.  Malcolm Gladwell’s "The Tipping Point" is one such book and think I even picked it up in an airport bookstore at some point.  I had heard some positive things and it was both small and paperback making it appealing to carry around.

I finally finished it on my last plane ride and several things jumped out at me including his discussion in the Afterword about "The Rise of Immunity" and how the newness or novelty of something can wear off as it becomes more mainstream.  He discusses the phone and how the rise of telemarketing led to caller ID and answering machines and how that is a sign of immunity.  Email, Gladwell contends, is following a similar path in that receiving email use to be novel but has evolved to be a hassle both in terms of who sends them to us and the sheer volume received.

"The fact that anyone can email us for free, if they have our address, means that people frequently and persistently e-mail us.  But that quickly creates immunity, and simply makes us value face-to-face communications – and the communications of those we know and trust – all the more"

Other interesting tidbits include how groups of 150 or less are more conducive to true social relationships and that individuals can’t maintain over 10 to 15 close relationships due to the investment of time and emotional energy needed to maintain them.

It’s a good read about how trends emerge and how things can quickly become mainstream due, in part, to small events.

A pretty elementary write up by Marshall Loeb from MarketWatch on choosing between sending an email and picking up the phone. 

Entertaining post via Brad Feld on what lurks between the lines in our emails. Here’s the link.

There is a great deal of buzz around new ways to communicate that seek to replace email as the main form of collaboration in the workplace.  From text messaging to more social approaches like blogs and RSS.  Love it or hate it, email is entrenched in the daily habits of millions of workers all over the world.  Here’s my take on why:

• Email is ubiquitous – everybody has at least one email address and, more importantly, knows how to use it.  Even more importantly, most everyone they know has an email address (reference the evolution of fax machine adoption) and knows how to use it
  
• Email is (mostly) free – in corporate environments, there is no direct cost associated with sending or receiving an email as it is a service provided by IT where the costs are more indirect (bandwidth, labor, storage, etc.).  Also, I am not including "consequence" costs like e-discovery, litigation, liability, etc.  From a web mail perspective (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) perspective, there is no cost to not only sending and receiving, but to having access.
  
• Email is trusted – there is an assumption that unless a message bounces back as undeliverable that it made it to the recipient and they have it in their Inbox.  Spam and other malicious types of messages are still out there but, while still a nuisance, most corporate messaging folks I deal with think this has been addressed (meaning no need to buy something else as what they have is "good enough")
  
• Email is formal – at its core an email is a business record in a corporate environment and a more official or serious way to communicate versus more causal means like IM
• Email is flexible – content, attachments, format, recipients, & purpose are all left in the hands of the sender to configure/customize/personalize

Fred Wilson did a post on "What Trumps Email?" that lays out a great framework for analysis.

I’m going to take a look at the other forms of communication both established and emerging and their fit as an alternative or even replacement for email in the enterprise in upcoming posts.

I thought this was pretty funny when I posted on it before.  The Washington Post is running with a story on it and, of course, has to have a counterpoint to Fred’s point.  This comes in the form of Carnegie Mellon professor David Farber who is quoted in the article as saying of Fred:

"For a venture capitalist to say something like this — he should get out of the technology field," Farber said.

Now I don’t personally know David or Fred, but I think it is fair to assume the demands on their time and the volume/urgency/content of emails varies significantly.  Fred’s triage approach is similar to mine – those that are urgent or from certain senders get my attention first.  Others including CC’s don’t get a response and, in most cases, I refuse to carry on a conversation in email

Here is Fred’s response.

Email is broken and companies and individuals are trying to figure out what to do about it.  Using new/better forms of collaboration and communication like IM, blogs, RSS, and text messaging demonstrates the type of forward thinking a venture capitalist (or anyone else) must have to understand the technologies available to address the significant pain related to email.  Companies and institutions (like CMU) can’t move as fast to try and adopt new technologies organization-wide creating the demand for products (like ours) to help manage email.  The reasons for this are many from the significant investments already made in email infrastructure to institutionalized end-user habits

Email is not going away any time soon and we all have to figure out how we will manage the increasing volume of it until something better comes along.

Good article today in the Wall Street Journal (thanks Cindy) on the use of graphics, links, and logos in email signatures.  As the one responsible for marketing/brand at this company and others, having a standard signature block (or several options as I have learned to do) for employees to use in their email signature can be an exercise in futility – even when trying to promote a link or marketing program as we do here at MessageGate.  Enforcement is difficult and it ranks pretty low on the list of priorities.  That said, there are some issues about unchecked use of these types of things.

When we first began to do our Activity Profiles, we were surprised at both the count and volume of image files causing us to implement a threshold approach to ensure the results were digestible (meaning that there were too many occurrences of .jpg and other image files to be meaningful).  There were so many images of both valid logos and random cats, flowers, and animated icons that we chose to focus only on those deemed egregiously large as a starting point.  Much like me, our customers’ policing of the signature block is part of the brand management program but hardly a priority item and can be invisible to those that are concerned with it.

This story tackles the issue of personalization and how it is moving beyond mainstream email, phone, IM, etc. details to avatars, quotes, and other such images in the name of further personalizing the message.  Maybe I am old school, but don’t really believe the bottom of a company supplied email is the place for you to champion personal causes to unsuspecting recipients or to share pictures of kitty cats doing funny things.  Mostly because, contrary to what most folks think, the email is not yours – it is a company business record and they are accountable for what is in it.  You’d be surprised how much of this exists in corporate email and what both the bandwidth and storage implications can be.  Using our threshold approach above, we see entertainment files (audio, image, video) accounting for upwards of 20% of corporate email volume (GB/TB).  Even if signatures account for just a portion of it, that’s a lot of crap to transport and store in the name of personalization.

Dave Barry of The New York Times recently did a review of the book Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home that I previously posted on here.  Maybe it has something to do with one of the authors working at the NYT as well, but Dave is pretty positive on the book although the review is more about how email is broken than the actual book itself.

That said, he sums up the essential message in two rules:

1.  Think before you send
2.  Send email you would like to receive

Eureka!  I think they are on to something…

Easier said than done for sure and, as previous posts on SenderConfirm highlight, the answer to this problem resides with the person sending first and foremost.

Another thing that I thought was hysterical and is why my blog is titled as it is –

"Please do not take this personally, “Reply All” people, but: everybody hates you."

I originally picked this up from Scott Niesen at Attensa – a company down in Portland focused on bringing RSS to the enterprise – something that I think is really cool and very needed.  I’ve downloaded their trial software and plan on setting it up this week.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  More on enterprise RSS later…

Is it possible?  Not likely in the workplace anytime soon.  What has been surprising is that we have seen some companies actually ask this question internally.

"If email is such a hassle, so inefficient, creates so much headache, and is such a source of litigation exposure, why don’t we turn it off?"

After a few moments of nervous laughter around the table, there is a disturbing clarity that sets in – you can’t turn it off.

One of our customers actually conducted the analysis to understand if placing a phone call or sending an email is cheaper.  They have 100k+ employees and have a significant private voice network that drives the cost of calls way down.  That said, email still came in as the "cheaper" alternative.  I’ve not seen the calculations, but it provided them the clarity they needed to embrace email as a core communication platform.

It forms the foundation of all core business processes including how you share information, interact with customers, and generally run your day-to-day business operations.  It is the de facto workflow/file manager/document management system as all of these technologies are at least one if not a dozen steps behind it.   Sharepoint may indeed be the dark horse out there and I can see a path to getting to that type of collaboration, but the majority of workers are deeply rooted in their email lives.  Cliff Reeves has a great post on Sharepoint here.

So, if you can’t live without it, how do you live with it?