The real cost of email in organisations

James Robertson has posted another of his CM Briefings, this time on The real cost of email in organisations:

Much has been written about the impact of 'email overload', in terms of the productivity cost and impact on attention spans for staff.

There is another very real cost of the reliance on email: the duplication of information management activities.

The problem is real, as I have seen at clients.  Managers send out critical information on email, and everyone is left to figure out whether, where and who to keep that information in their own personal stuff management systems.

The solution?  He proposes the elimination of this type of email for central (sensible) storage on the corporate intranet.  As he cautions, making this change is not a simple thing.  The information on the intranet has to be correct, and it has to be accessible to everyone who might need it.

2 Comment(s)

» Individual Needs vs. Organizational Goals from ...no straight lines...

The problem, as it turned out, was that when an individual in the organization would actually want to use this directory, accessing it on the web based system took nearly twice as long (16 seconds vs. 7 seconds) as simply opening it from their local ... Read More

joitske said:

I recognise the email problem (from my colleagues ofcourse not for myself :). But I see the solution not in the intranet perse, but rather in going from push (email) to pull technologies by using RSS feeds (tagging), internal blogs, etc.

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This entry was published on July 5, 2006 10:16 PM and has 2 comment(s).

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