On Breaking the E-mail Compulsion

Often the blogosphere just points you to great posts. Luis Suarez pointed us/me to this great post on email overload on the tfpl blog. It is titled "Breaking the e-mail compulsion". It passes on some interesting facts about email use and addiction. It goes on to give us some good email tips (which I apply already). But what really triggered me was the big question:
The challenge that I would like organisations and vendors to address is this:
  • How do we enable colleagues to generate, send and store an important communication about a project within the same application that holds the rest of the documents, communications and information relating to that project?
I can't tell you too much, but colleagues of mine addressed this issue and answered this question to a large extent. I pointed to a paper on this work here. And I hope to publish another paper on this topic with them soon. So, keep in touch!
"Context" and keeping information "in context" is what it's all about. And that is what email is not good at, leading to a large part of our email overload issues.

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 4, 2008 at 9:59 AM

    That's what we get for turning email into something it's not meant to do.
    Basically, what we're getting is information that's coming in FASTER, because it's so easy to make noise at the expense of the recipients.

    So trying to process this mostly-human activity is like working with a lot of background noise.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Please leave a comment! Just log in using one of the formats and if you want me to get back to you. Otherwise comment anonymously.

Popular posts

Keep the Intranet Small

Image
This tweet by Jonathan Phillips ( @digitaljonathan ) triggered to finalize this post, that's been burning in my draft box. I've always been intrigued by how unsuccessful many intranets are. And there are all kinds of good reasons for intranet failure. One of the things that is hardly ever mentioned is: Shouldn't the intranet be smaller? Usually intranets are huge. Lots and lots of pages with lots and lots of content. With complex navigation. The intranet  evaluation surveys almost always show employees only use the news page and people finder. But still we build and maintain nice big intranets. Not only stats point to smaller intranets. There are others reasons as well. I came up with a few. If you have more, just leave a comment. Here's my list: -            user requirements: users don't require large intranet -            search/navigation: searching and navigating a small ...
Read more

Enterprise 2.0 Research

Image
There's not too much fundamental research on Enterprise 2.0. Deloitte recently published interesting research done on enterprise 2.0 implementations and their return-on-investment. In the EU research has also done as well. Study is being done for the European Commission and it was carried out by Tech4i2, IDC and Headshift. What was the goal of the study? Goals of the study To provide a clear definition of Enterprise 2.0 is, describe the market and the positioning of EU industry, also in comparison with US and Asia; To analyze the take-up of Enterprise 2.0, the organizational requirements, and the role on the transition to a knowledge based low-carbon economy; To collect evidence on its macro-economic impact, as a market opportunity for the European Software industry and as a productivity tool for European business; To identify and analyse both the direct and contextual challenges, including the need for Next Generation Access and the legal barriers; To analyse an...
Read more

Innovation in Turbulent Times

Image
I love reading articles about innovation. And every now and then you read one that is very interesting. "Innovation in Turbulent Times" by Rigby, Gruver, Allen (in HBR, June 2009) is one of them. This article takes fashion companies as an example for continuous, year-by-year innovation. And how successful fashion companies are usually led by two people: a left-brainer and a right-brainer. "If you don't have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won't get innovation. Most companies in other industries ignore this lesson." They extend this to show that successful non-fashion companies have the same kind of leadership. And this kind of leadership is usually also characterized by a long-term relationship. I think this concept can also be extended to teams and projects as well. More often than not, people are good at one or the other: thinking up great concepts or ideas, or, making them. In teams and projects we can learn from this as...
Read more