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10.17.08 Broken Business Processes Due To E-mail Overload  By Ross Mayfield E-mail overload is the leading cause of preventable productivity loss in organizations today. Basex Research recently estimated that businesses lose $650 billion annually in productivity due to unnecessary e-mail interruptions. And the average number of corporate e-mails sent and received per person per day are expected to reach over 228 by 2010. The fundamental problem of this otherwise great technology is largely behavioral, and new practices and technologies are arising to solve it. A major contributor to e-mail overload is broken business processes. When an environment changes, business processes fail to adapt, and this causes exceptions. For example, when a customer requests information that isn't provided by a standard support process, it can kick off a chain of e-mails hunting for information--and what is found isn't easily captured into the redesign of the process. We haven't had good tools and practices for resolving these exceptions and learning from them. In The Only Sustainable Edge, John Seely Brown and John Hagel identify that most employee time is not spent executing process, but handling exceptions to process. Commercial e-mail spam filters and virus protection do a reasonable job today. What remains is behavioral--not how e-mail works, but how we work with it and how we shouldn't. According to Gartner Group, 30% of e-mail is "occupational spam," characterized by excessive CC, BCC and Reply-All use. Not by coincidence, Socialtext customers commonly decrease e-mail volume by 30% and moving e-mails to collaborative workspaces that are designed for one-to-many or many-to-many communication. From a user's point of view, e-mail is what you could call a push medium. Beyond your control, anyone can push an e-mail into your inbox at near zero cost. By contrast, new Web 2.0 media emphasize pull technology: You choose who or what you want to subscribe to, pull information to you when you want it and unsubscribe when you want. Ideally, we would use push mediums for directed private or time-sensitive communication and pull for less formal, more public and less urgent communication. Now there is a choice--so long as you can gain agreement on which to use for what and how to use it. Eugene Kim says there is "no such thing as collaboration without a shared goal." For every group that you regularly communicate with, one of your goals should be to increase communications efficiency and effectiveness. Without these shared goals and practices, behavior will not change. And with new technologies, you have the opportunity to transform communication habits into collaborative best practices. Here are the top five tactics for making e-mail an efficient and effective collaboration tool: Establish Internal E-Mail Practices Within your organization or community, review your current e-mail habits. Consider establishing agreements on the formality, tone, brevity, distribution, responsiveness and timing. Then try bold experiments such as "E-mail-Free Fridays"--not necessarily because they will work, but for learning what could work and raising awareness of the cost of e-mail. Other peers might help bring awareness to work/life balance issues when always on mobile e-mail. Move Group E-mail to Collaborative Workspaces Continue reading this article. About the Author: Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.
He also writes Ross Mayfield's Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings. |
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