Ramon Padilla from Tech Republic picked up on a quote of mine from a Christopher Lynch interview:
“(Employees) spend most of their time handling exceptions to business
processes. That’s what they are doing in their inbox for four hours a
day. E-mail has become the great exception handler.”
In Ramon's article he explores how did we get here and why has it happened. Here are the headlines of the five points he explores.
- Making it up as we go along.
- Not enforcing business processes.
- Business processes that are not automated or automated with software that is outdated or doesn’t fulfill the user’s needs.
- Lack of communications within an application or integration with other communication mechanisms.
- Lack of communication alternative besides e-mail.
If you would like to learn more about this issue, please help me by voting on Fast Company's The Killer Pitch for this story:
Most people don't
dispute that they suffer from email overload. A recent report from
Basex in the NYTimes revealed that people spend 28% of their day
interrupted by things like unnecessary email. However, what we do about
our overload is a source of much debate.
Socialtext
has connected the dots between a few reports to discover that a great
deal of our email comes from handling exceptions. Because business
processes don't have a system to translate them into practice, we spend
more than a quarter of our day emailing about the exceptions to the
business process rules.
Worse than the volume of email is the
amount of mental energy required by each email recipient, ergo worker,
to parse each exception and determine what to do with it. E-mail was
once intended to increase productivity and has now become so voluminous
it is counter productive. Basex determined that business loose $650
billion in productivity due to the unnecessary email interruptions.
And, the average number of corporate emails sent and received per
person per day expected to reach over 228 by 2010.
Socialtext
has been building out business practice support using their
customizable Enterprise 2.0 platform to return email back to its
rightful place in the communication stratigraphy, which is not as the
catch-all for exception handling. Their business social software makes
the process more productive, reducing email by 30%. With the growth in
the remote workforce, global coverage, proliferation of mobile devices,
and social technologies; collaboration is the solution to improve the
effectiveness of communication and address these forces.
Personally, I think we should win because our pitch uses the word stratigraphy.
