Email: The cholesterol of modern business

Think back to the backlog of emails waiting for you after your holiday. Was it 30, 300 or 3,000 messages? Whatever the number, it probably took too long to clear.

The easy bit is getting through the spam - just delete without reading.

Paranoid managers take the harder route and take their laptops on holiday 'just to keep up'. Others read the recent messages and skip the rest on the assumption that senders will resend anything important.

This response, of course, is risky and can have sudden and dire consequences.

An operations manager might miss an important update to health and safety requirements. A slow response to a complaint from your best customer might be disastrous for the relationship. An internal email might end up as Exhibit A in court in a libel case against your company.

The proliferation of email is getting out of control and our inboxes are full of stuff that shouldn't be there. All this is symptomatic of something deeper: the detritus of poorly managed knowledge work.

We want to be a true knowledge economy, and not a data-processing economy. To achieve this, Gartner believes that the IT industry has to radically improve the productivity of knowledge workers and work teams over the next decade.

Further investment in systems to run operations or handle transactions may have diminishing returns. These lower-level functions are becoming utilities that can be delivered by business process outsourcers.

New strategic value to business will come from productivity advances in true knowledge work, including product design, risk management and analysis of customer behaviour.

Today's email overload is really only a symptom of our lack of progress, but it is one we can address. Comparisons with the email-free office environment aren't good enough anymore - no one under 35 has ever experienced one.

We will need innovative work in sociology, psychology and anthropology to accompany the expected advances in hardware, software and telecommunications. Knowledge workers need new tools and techniques to create more wealth from fewer keystrokes.

There are signs that IT departments are starting to address the challenge. Gartner has received many questions about how to create and manage taxonomies for classifying and managing information. This suggests that organisations are starting to invest in more strategic knowledge management projects.

Such work, of course, is for the long term. And in the short term, the flood of emails can only grow bigger. It is likely to become a strategic issue.

These are some of the steps managers need to take to reduce the email burden on knowledge workers:

• Limit file sizes. Managers should set and maintain tough limits on email account sizes
• Promote advanced user training. Few people move beyond the basics of using email
• Move applications off the email system. Administrative tasks, such as time sheets or expenses, are better handled on corporate portals and intranets
• Offer alternative channels of communication. Instant messaging and telephone conferencing can lighten the load
• Establish policies and etiquette
• Lead by intervention

The last is the most important. It is also the cheapest. Next time someone clutters a hundred inboxes with something of interest to only five people, make the effort to tell them that this is not acceptable.

Set policies not only for handling offensive material, but for handling humorous video clips.

This is not to say that email should not be used. A colleague likes to say that "email is the cholesterol of modern management".

Email is essential to our health. But too much of it can be damaging and dangerous. Diet and discipline are necessary to forestall the health hazards of proliferating email.

Mark Raskino is a research director at analyst Gartner.

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