Working as an information management consultant I have definitely developed a new appreciation of email management challenges. Prior to consulting, I spent most of my time focused on what appears to be the biggest problem, volume. However, I now have a new understanding of the complexity involved with email management. There is no single “magic-bullet” solution that will resolve all the challenges.
Most of the professional resources I read about email are focused on volume, how to manage it, and how to capture business records. When I think about the email problem and how it impacts my clients, the volume is really just a symptom of something much larger. By placing the focus on volume, it doesn’t adequately address some of the other, perhaps more serious problems, that also impact email management.
Email is used to accomplish so many things that determining which angle to work on first could be difficult. Here are the some of the many uses I know about, all of which also contribute to volume:
- Collaborating by sending attachments
- Sending emails for reminders or tasks to yourself and/or others
- Accessing documents/information remotely
- Creating customized filing systems in mailboxes for retrieval purposes
- Communicating with other people
- Maintaining a “paper trail”
- Disseminating information (i.e. newsletters, promotionals, notifications)
This is short list, but I’m sure there are other uses out there. People are accustomed to using email for everything. Over the years I’ve noticed that people would rather force a familiar tool (i.e. email) to do something it’s not designed to do rather than learn a new tool that is better suited for the job.
In addition to all of the uses above contributing to volume, how email traffic is controlled also needs to be considered. By that I mean how to control employees forwarding emails to a personal Gmail account. Once received in the Gmail account, the user has the option of replying with the work address, even though all of the content is stored on a Google server instead of the company one. Equally perplexing is how to manage employees who bcc work emails to personal email accounts, for fear of missing something or maybe to retain a “paper trail.”
Last year I worked in collaboration with other consultants on a project. One other consultant and I both had our company emails routed through Google servers, which was immediately flagged by the client as risky. We were required to route our emails through another server in order to communicate with the client. We never did get a straight answer about the flag, but perhaps it was to prevent employees from using their Gmail accounts to handle work communications.
In my mind, the first steps towards resolving email management challenges start with the basics by identifying root causes of volume and understanding how people really use email. Email is complex and it’s going to require multiple strategies to effectively manage all the moving parts.