System iNetwork

October 23, 2007

E-Mail: Eating Us Alive, and Worse

Halloween's just around the corner. Maybe now's a good time for us to huddle around the monitor and tell scary stories. Here's one. It's all about e-mail.

Even if you've never used an SMTP or POP3 server to send e-mail directly from your System i (see Dan Riehl's article on the topic if you want to know how), e-mail probably plays a huge role in your life. Large enough that maybe you'll be interested in some thought fodder on the topic. The short story is that e-mail as a means of business communication is going from dominant to overwhelming. Professionals are losing as much as two hours a day of productivity to dealing with it. Worst of all, not only is e-mail archiving contributing to storage problems, but also if the archiving isn't handled properly, you could be increasing your enterprise's exposure to potential litigation. So while I realize that e-mail is, for most of us, a PC-type problem, if you're a System i shop that isn't at least thinking about some of the implications of e-mail, you may have a slight tunnel-vision problem.

We'll start with a news flash, seemingly from last century in a way, that was released just a few weeks ago when Dimension Data, a South African IT services company that specializes in helping clients plan and manage network infrastructures, announced the results of a study it commissioned called "The End of Communications as We Know It." The study reports that e-mail has passed telephony as the primary means of business communication. One hundred percent of study participants reported using e-mail as a technology for communicating, compared to 80 percent for land-line telephones, 76 percent for mobile telephones, and 66 percent for instant messaging. The study surveyed 390 IT managers and 524 enterprise users (presumably using a mixture of platforms) in 13 countries in North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

Although the volume of my e-mail traffic swamped my incoming telephone calls around the time Y2K stopped being a problem, this study shows that it's happening to most people now and probably has actually been the case for a while. Dimension Data speculates that this is because people would rather e-mail someone than call him or her on the phone. This makes some sense intuitively because you have time to think about what to write in an e-mail, whereas on the phone your stutters, flubs, lame metaphors, and off-the-cuff stupid statements are instantly irrecoverable. Dimension Data's answer is to unify all your communications with their help, but that's another story.

What surprises me most about Dimension Data's study is that 70 percent of those surveyed reported that e-mail impacts positively on their productivity, with instant messaging, blogs, and softphones (i.e., VOIP) most often reported as being disruptive to productivity. That seems like an opposite finding from a study released last December by CohesiveKnowledge, a company that, I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn, sells a book on how to deal with the problem. That study analyzed 1,000 corporate-employee surveys about e-mail use in 2005. (Admittedly, this information is a little old, but I think it's a safe bet that, if anything, the numbers such a study would find here in 2007 would be worse.)

The sobering summary of results is that even back in 2005, professionals spent an average of two hours a day processing e-mail, with 30 minutes of this occurring after business hours. Survey takers estimated that 25 percent of it was wasted time because that many messages were less than useful, if not outright spam. This is the equivalent of 15 wasted days per year per employee. Those surveyed also reported an average of 41 messages a day, 54 percent said they "often" receive messages about their e-mail storage being over their limit, and 88 percent agreed that they "often" receive unnecessary e-mail. (Stop and think about how many jokes, cartoons, videos, cute kitty/doggie/baby pictures, and links to websites that you never knew existed you get per week that are sent to you deliberately by well-meaning friends and relatives.) Perhaps the most amusing finding of this study is that 75 percent reported that their colleagues regularly overuse the "reply-to-all" button, while only 14 percent admitted they overuse this feature. Uh-huh!

Our e-mail is eating us alive, and I don't think this situation means that not enough people use spam filters, either. Although it's true that software of that kind can filter out some of the most obvious spam, some of it still gets through. How much good are spam filters really doing us when, in most cases, they simply dump the suspected spam in a repository, and then you have to go look through it all anyway to make sure someone didn't send you a legitimate business offer or an important message from a Hotmail account!

Finally, there's the problem of what happens to all that e-mail after you receive it. What's important to keep, what's OK to throw away? Even if you only get 41 messages a day, that's 41 value judgements you have to make. The impulse is to be safe, to keep it for a while "just in case" you need to reference it or produce it to prove something. Obviously, that adds up to lots more time handling e-mail, and more storage space. Did you realize that it's a potential legal hassle for you?

Cue our final study, one released just two weeks ago by Recommind, a search-software provider (not for System i, by the way). This study points out that many enterprises can't meet the electronic discovery processes currently mandated by law. It seems that as a result of amendments made to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) last December, organizations can be required to produce "a copy of, or a description by category and location of, all documents, electronically stored information, and tangible things" relevant to most legal proceedings within 14 days of being so requested!.

Could that possibly be a problem for you if you had to produce a particular e-mail message from last year in 14 days? If you have all your storage onsite, how do you find what you need? If you're like many companies that hold such materials at external locations outside a company-controlled retention process, according to Recommind, you might have to use expensive "legal-hold" retention processes to corral that information. If you don't, you could be subject to monetary penalties (Recommind characterizes them as "severe") for failure to produce evidence.

I'm not trying to be excessively alarmist, but hopefully you have started thinking about e-mail as a bit more of a double-edged sword. We can't do without it. For the moment it's an inextricable part of the way we all do business. But as a user, think about finding a way to cut back a little on the frivolous e-mail traffic you send and allow others to send you. For the sake of your company's efficiency, perhaps you should think about offering some e-mail productivity classes to your users. For the sake of your company's finances if it should ever be involved in a legal action, think about how you can find a particular piece of information in the mountain of data your users are forcing your enterprise to save every day.

Posted by at October 23, 2007 3:16 PM