E-mail: Reports of My Demise are Premature
It is both premature and foolhardy to proclaim that e-mail’s reign as “king of communications” is over as a recent Wall Street Journal article trumpets.
E-mail remains the most-used corporate communications tool despite reports to the contrary.
Not that e-mail is the best communications medium for everything; indeed we know very well it isn’t.
Instead, e-mail has, in the past 15 years in particular, become that path of least resistance for almost everything that transpires within an organization.
Update status? Send an e-mail to a few hundred of one’s closest colleagues.
Finish a report? Send another e-mail to a few hundred of one’s closest colleagues.
The fact is that we use e-mail opportunistically rather than with an understanding as to what the impact of its use might be.
Sending that status report to those few hundred colleagues actually cost the organization ca. 24 hours in lost time when one calculates the few minutes each person spent opening the e-mail he didn’t need to receive in the first place – plus the “recovery time,” which is the time it takes to get back to where one was in the task that was interrupted.
The result of all of our communications (and it isn’t just e-mail) is Information Overload, a problem that costs the U.S. economy ca. $900 billion per annum. On August 12, Information Overload Awareness Day was observed around the world with meetings and discussions. But that’s just one day – each additional day that we don’t address the problem of Information Overload and take steps to lessen its impact costs billions.
Companies can take steps to lower their exposure to Information Overload (an article about what can be done may be found at here) but even raising awareness of the problem and understanding the impact of overusing such tools as e-mail can make a big difference.
Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.
October 16th, 2009 09:51
Email – serves SEVERAL important, IRREPLACEABLE functions:
1. For better and worse, it’s “intrusive”; it arrives at the
addressees’ mail-servers; if they check their email, there it is!
2. UNlike this active-contact nature of email … blogs, net
postings, etc., merely sit someplace, waiting for potential
recipients to ferret them out. (Subscriptions to blogs, RSS feeds,
etc., are merely variations of email.)
3. Email is compact to store and easy to index and search
(especially if it’s plain-text as opposed to having extensively
formatted content).
4. Email generally makes the most efficient use of bandwidth, server
capacity, archival storage and indexing systems.
5. Perhaps most important, compared to the bandwidth and storage
hogs of audio and video – email and other text-based content is FAR
more efficient and utilitarian for providing information in its most
USEFUL form (although less useful for transmitting emotion and
motivation). E.g., information in text-form is ideal for quick
scanning, visual and computer-aided searches for specifics, etc.,
than audio or video will ever be!
October 16th, 2009 10:23
We need to remember all the average users out there. For them, email has passed in usefulness simply due to the overrun of spam and repeated attacks (e.g. viruses, phishing) published in the press. It might be comparable to the home phone prior to the donotcall.gov list. A necessary but annoying service.
I handle friends and family for their domains (or on my own) as a nice thing to do. If they get one spam per week, it’s a lot. The older and younger among the crowd have the largest need of assistance in this regard.
Many of their friends have largely abandoned email largely due to an overwhelming of junk mail on most systems. I spend a good deal of time battling the scurge of spam on behalf of my users (and have had the same email address for a dozen plus years). My own system stats show a 10:1 “junk:real” email content ratio at the incoming gates to my own service. that ratio may vary by 20% depending on the week, but we’re still looking at an order of magnitude more junk than useful email. that ratio has varied little over the last five years I’ve been looking.
A good example; I have hotmail, gmail, and yahoo mail accounts which Ido not use as tossaways at all, but alternatives for bank statements or other things that may get bumped by my own rules. I get hundreds of spam emails in each of those accounts every week.
I don’t know how the average user finds email useful, much less tolerable.
My only lament in the grand picture is the fact that invariably, it’s “my fault” when a legit email doesn’t go through once or twice per
month. there’s simply no concept of what a bad neighborhood is (e.g. most residential ISPs) on the internet. It’s tough to explain, but I’ve found some of the least willing to clean up their back yards to include large companies who violate basic netiquette rules for mailing lists. Others (newer companies) have been very amenable to correcting problems or issues in their systems upon good technical explanation.
Cheers,
Andy Burnette
November 5th, 2009 09:24
“Information Overload” is a false issue – we have always been overwhelmed by too much information, for example Times Square, an NFL football game, a block-buster action movie, the library, the rainforest, etc. We have adapted as humans to filter the information that is important to us with our senses and our minds. Much of this is subconscious – as is most of what we call “work”. As an analog to the workplace I would argue that most collaborative opportunities are lost with email when workers adapt to too much info by only paying attention to email from their supervisor or boss. In that way email actually may not overload with information but make work more “dumb” and hierarchical because of the “filter” applied by natural adaptation. So I would say that the causal model suggested by Mr. Spira is completely reversed.
December 9th, 2009 15:48
[...] In October, a Wall Street Journal writer proclaimed that e-mail’s reign as “king of communications” was over. Meanwhile more and more e-mail messages are sent every day. (My retort to this is here.) [...]