It's common to hear these days--in the age of social computing--that email is dead,
but if that's the case why are enterprises reportedly drowning in high
volumes of it? The fact is that when people say email is dead, what
they usually mean is that it's become such a clogged communication
channel that it's hardly worth using if you really want to get in touch
with somebody quickly. They also mean that as a result of uncontrolled
(or at least under-controlled) Spam, the problem is even worse.
Email in the enterprise
As a self-employed freelance writer, I don't spend a lot of time
inside large companies, but I have friends who do and they report that
email is used to basically cover your behind. You send an email to your
colleague explaining your reasoning for using Verdana instead of Arial
and CC the 40 people on the default font committee, their bosses and so
forth. You attach a Word document, which gets sent to the same 100-odd
people. You multiply this out thousands of times a day across a global
organization, and you have mountains of email, much of it repeated with
attachments being passed back and forth.
Unfortunately, storage space today is so cheap, that at a certain
level, it doesn't matter to IT how many times the same document gets
stored on the email servers, but from a practical, content-management
standpoint, at some point, you need to find a way to weed these out and
store only one copy of the email and attachment (or better yet use a
collaboration platform that distributes a pointer to the document
instead of the document itself; more on this later).
Email and eDiscovery
The issue becomes even more pronounced when you start dealing with
eDiscovery. Imagine getting an eDiscovery order for all the emails
related to X for a three month period. I have a friend who works at a
large company that reports getting several thousand emails a week and
he's just one of thousands of employees. How can IT manage all of this
under normal circumstances, never mind try to find all of the emails
related to one particular incident? It's a daunting task and companies
need to find ways to minimize the amount of email and have archiving
and disposal systems in place before the order comes to produce emails
as part of an evidence request.
Getting more social
This brings us back to the idea that email is dead. In a sense it
is. How can any of us keep up with the sheer volume? One way to
minimize the email problem is to get more social. By using
collaboration tools, micro-blogging, wikis and so forth, we can begin
to shift communication and reduce the amount of information floating
around inside the enterprise emails servers.
Email isn't going
away, any more than the telephone went away when email became popular,
but by trying to refocus communication to alternate channels, companies
can reduce the amount of email, transferring the content management
problem to another place, but ultimately streamlining communication in
the enterprise. Email may not be dead, but it's not resting very
comfortably and we need to find ways to alleviate its pain.
By: Ron Miller for 
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