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/
