Email is by far the most commonly used and most widely adopted tool in on-line collaboration. It is also the means of delivering a listserve - but that usage is discussed separately.
While email is extraordinary in enabling networked communication, there is also a threat to business efficiency if it is used inappropriately. The percentage of the workday spent checking, reading and sending email is significant for many employees in todays big organizations.
The Advantages of Email
One to many communication is biggest single advantage of Email. (It is also the biggest drawback). Email is an excellent medium for broadcasting memos, giving instructions, sending invitations and sharing news.
Speed - email works as both a syncronous and asyncronous communication method, it can be fast to compose and
Accessability - most people can retrieve email from anywhere they can access the internet, including by cellphones or PDAs.
Permanence - important emails (and most unimportant ones too) are stored and searchable over the medium to long term.
Privacy -
allows one person to send to several people the same, consistent message at the same moment. At the same time this can also be considered as a disadvantage. Think on Spam. A less obvious disadvantage, but used frequently though, is the potential unnecessary mass group discussions due to the use of the reply all button. Imagine you send out a mail to 100 people with an invitation to a special kick off lunch. They all use the reply all button to thank you for organizing and they add some kind words. Even if it takes only 1 minute to check the mail and delete it, it cost your organization still more than 166 Hours.
Disadvantages of email
As time management principles are indicating: we tend to do the most urgent things first, not the most important things. Email is an exponent of this.
To help reduce this potential inefficiency, some organisations have introduced email policy, or email etiquette guides. These provide guidance on what is acceptable and recommeded practice in the use of email. They give advice on who should be included in the circulation of email and generally recommend that 'reply all' is seldom good practice! They also give guidance on what it is appropraite to put in an email - one organization I know has in their guide: 'Before you hit the 'send' button ask yourself if you would be happy to see this email reproduced on the front page of the New York Times'.
Of course, email can become self-regulating - most emailing solutions allow you to set rules that filter your incoming mail so as to automatically direct certain types of mail to specified mailboxes, or even to delete it, or send to standard email in return to the sender. One colleague of mine had a simple way of handling his email whilst on holiday - he set his 'out of office' message to send a reply mail stating that he was away on holiday and if the sender's message was important (it was then deleted) could they please send it again on his return!
One of the big problems with email is that as more collaboration is needed in the organization, more the email is used an more attachments (documents, spreadsheets and presentations) are distribuited among colleagues in and out the organization. In particular during the creation of this content we can observe several versions of this documents going around making the version management and the content management impossible. That is a bad practice called Document Based Collaboration (read more about this issue here). The use of email has to evolve if we want to be more collaborative: the use of intranets combined with wikis, email (for notifications), chat and other collaborative tools is the best way.
Use email for:
Page Last Updated: Sep 7 11:04am by Max Ugaz