We know that the purpose of e-mail is to help people communicate
with each other in a store-and-forward manner. It is an implicit
business activity. When something becomes the norm, it is usually
time to relook at it from an effectiveness and improvement
perspective. When something is widely used, it is also amenable to
some overuse, misuse or inefficiency.
What do we use e-mail for?
- Informing others about something.
- Asking for other people’s opinion, help,
guidance.
- Requesting for meetings and appointments.
- Delegating some work.
- Doing something with attachments (review, submit, approve,
etc).
- Managing conflict, discussing, arguing, pleading,
enforcing…
- Asking for some specific information.
I am going to look at each of these uses and check if we really
require e-mail to do these things.
What can end-users do independently? You may think this is a
very long list. But in reality there are only two things that are
guaranteed to be under their control: Working on their desktop PCs
/ laptops and using e-mail.
- Personal work is done using the PC/laptop.
- Teamwork is done using e-mail.
Other things like business applications, server based file
shares, etc, are governed and controlled by the IT department. The
problem arises when there are files involved in teamwork. Mails are
sent to team members with multiple attachments. Using e-mails with
attachments for managing teamwork leads to CHAOS!
Chaos scenario
Here is a
common example. Someone wants to gather some data from other users.
What does the user do? She has control over desktop and e-mail
only. So she creates an Excel file with some column headings and
mails the empty format to multiple people as CC. Now each one of
them will fill in the data and send it back. Now the originator
manually consolidates the data. Here are the problems associated
with this approach:
- Multiple copies of Microsoft Office Excel files.
- Lots of time is wasted in waiting for people
to respond.
- Manual work is involved in saving, keeping track of and
combining multiple files.
- Data entered may have errors leading to more iterations and
delays.
- Interim updates complicate matters further.
On the face of it there is no easy solution. Only a few people
are involved in the process. Hence, nobody in IT is going to
develop a centralized application for such data capture needs. Even
in an organization with 100 users, such activities are quite
common. Most IT teams will get inundated with such application
development very quickly. Therefore, in spite of knowing the
problems associated with this approach, all of us continue to use
e-mail for such activities.
The solution is to create a user self-service collaboration
mechanism. Users should be able to create their own centralized
application—without knowing programming. SharePoint and
similar applications offer such capabilities out of the box.
This is just one example of e-mail misuse. Let us see more examples
and relevant solutions.
Summary
E-mail misuse can be easily minimized by utilizing newer
technologies to our advantage. Adoption of such technologies
requires demonstrating the benefits to users by sensitizing them to
the disadvantages of ad-hoc e-mail usage.
In short, team activities that require files and attachments are
best done using some approach other than e-mail.