Enterprise Applications: Still Using Email as Notification Engine?

Salesforce.com recently co-sponsored a survey in the UK looking at the impact of business email on productivity and archiving. 38% of the 1,000 British employees indicated they suffered from information overload with work emails. The study gives examples of common enterprise email tactics in an attempt to explain diminishing employee efficiency and growing archiving requirements.

The question I have is why do enterprise applications like Salesforce.com continue to integrate email as their means for communicating alerts and notifications to users? Certainly many of the unnecessary emails being sent and archived are those that are auto-generated from other software applications. With on-demand applications in the cloud available 24x7 from the desktop, smart phone, cars and even our televisions is it unreasonable to expect that the promises of work flow in the enterprise would allow for a clean break from the email engine?

Perhaps an alternative perspective to the Salesforce.com survey findings is that users are beginning to rely on email primarily as an archive engine rather than a first line of communication. In this light it makes sense that users over communicate and desire to save everything, even their personal messages sent via the business account (although that may be more of a convenience resulting from better connectivity with their business systems over personal systems).

If there is one take-away from the vast amounts of mobile applications and social networking platforms in use today it is that we can certainly get by without receiving notifications and alerts to our email. I for one have lived with a yet-to-be-validated email address for my Twitter account for most of the year (because the verification email sent by Twitter keeps getting lost in cyberspace and never manages to reach my email gateway, but that is another issue for another post) and I haven't missed a single tweet, direct message or follower despite the lack of email notifications.

What do you think...could you live without email? Share your response by responding to my poll on this site or post a comment.

Read the full article on the Salesforce.com survey findings at: http://aaa26.2lzy.com/

Can Assigning Value to Email Reduce Your Stress?

I recently read an article entitled "The Problem Isn't Information Overload" by David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done. In it, Mr. Allen helps to narrow the definition of what truly causes us stress when our email inbox begins to overflow. He argues that it is not a matter of information overload, but one of being faced with too many decisions about the potential value of the information contained in each email.
The great take away for me was the need for developing a means for users to quickly discern the potential value of a communication, without having to read the entire communication, so that they could categorize the message into a value bucket. Those value buckets being something along the lines of:

1. I need to take action on this now.
2. I will need to take action on this in the future by a specific date/time.
3. There is some relevant reference material worth saving, file it away.
4. I can easily find this information myself should I need it in the future so it is okay to delete.
5. This has no value to me, delete it now.

Do you have other value buckets? If so, please share them with the community.
What is the minimum information you would need about an email to assign it a value bucket?
You can read David Allen's full article here.

8 Tips for Climbing Out of Your Inbox

The March issue of Entrepreneur magazine featured an article by business coach, trainer and author, Joe Robinson, on how email is making us stupid. In the article I found a nice side-bar on ways to limit disruptions caused by email. Many of these have been shared before, but it is always worth a reminder to help us stay focused on completing tasks rather than just passing the ball.

8 Tips

1. Turn off all visual and sound alerts that announce new mail.
2. Check e-mail two to four times a day at designated times and never more often than every 45 minutes.
3. Don't let e-mail be the default communication device. Communicating by phone or face-to-face saves time and builds relationships.
4. Respond immediately only to urgent issues. Just because a message can be delivered instantly does not mean you must reply instantly.
5. Severely restrict use of the reply-all function.
6. Put "no reply necessary" in the subject line when you can. No one knows when an e-conversation is over without an explicit signal.
7. Resist your reply reflex. Don't send e-mails that say "Got it" or "Thanks.
8. Use automatic out-of-office messages to carve out focused work time, such as: "I'm on deadline with a project and will be back online after 4 p.m.

New Stats
The article also contained some new statistics I had not previously encountered. Intel estimates cost of lost productivity due to email overload to be $1billion/year for large companies. RescueTime says average office employee checks email 50 times per day and instant messages 77 times per day. E-policy Institute estimates email volume is growing at 66% per year.

To read the full article at Entrepreneur.com, click here.

About the author: Joe Robinson, a business coach and trainer, is the author of Work to Live and the audio CD The Email Overload Survival Kit.