Recovering Lost Knowledge

A Pew Internet and American Life Project survey of business users last year found 84 percent of respondents stated that e-mail is important or essential to their work. More than 63 percent preferred e-mail over telephone conversations. That is a whole lot of potentially lost knowledge - not to mention potential lawsuits - and some organizations are responding by switching e-mail off altogether. Founder of Canberra-based solution provider Intology Ralph Meyen says in the US the rate of Internet disconnection is currently greater than the rate of connection.

"So more people are now actually getting off the Internet than are getting on," Meyen says. "That's a very, very stunning statistic, and one put out by the US Congress Department."

Others, for whom turning off e-mail altogether is simply no answer at all, are starting to see the solution as lying in e-mail management software. More adventurous organizations are even using the analytics available within these e-mail management systems to identify relationships across the business processes and market segments for insight and root causes for change in the business.

Cutter Consortium senior consultant Arun Majumdar says in the business intelligence context, e-mail analytics can help a business determine possible outcomes for changes in its environment where other methods may fail. He says consistently applying analytics to monitor, analyze and understand e-mail content may prove essential in reducing operational risks.

"As a result of new legislation in place, e-mail is a legal construct," Majumdar says. "E-mail therefore is a legal and binding trace of the communications, intents, contracts and commitments among people, and therefore, an organization is liable for the content of messages sent from its e-mail systems. So it is crucial that CIOs, CFOs and CEOs quickly gain knowledge about the status, usage and challenges of e-mail management in their organizations via a methodical and stepwise checklist of key concerns.

"An enterprise can serve its customers more quickly and efficiently when it uses an intelligent e-mail management system while also safeguarding against inadvertent impropriety that could lead to litigation," he says.

Majumdar says a well-implemented e-mail management system can also do much more than protect the organization against litigation. Where there is collaboration and synthesis of information in an organization, e-mail analytics can provide a more complete understanding of that information. E-mail analytics can also help assess customer behaviours by measuring interest levels based on link click-through rates and time spent reading the message as well as by analyzing the responses by customer segments or groups.

"As for liabilities, the most obvious are the lawsuits that have ensued from e-mails, public exposure of e-mail communications and legal search and analysis of e-mails by law enforcement," he says. "E-mails also can serve as early warning signs, indicating tension in business relationships or interpersonal relationships, which can provide intelligence to HR to stave off the consequences of vengeful employees."

So far relatively few organizations - Meyen estimates less than 2 percent in Australia - have adopted e-mail analytical systems, partly because of a lack of maturity in the technology and market, but also due to privacy concerns. "I think business analytics period, be that in e-mail or in anything else, is very immature," he says.

Yet Meyen points out organizations do not necessarily need to consider buying more technology in order to better manage e-mail. The means for managing their e-mail is already available in software like Microsoft Word and Office, he says. It's just that feature bloat is so great that most users have only learned how to use a fraction of the features available.

"I think the problem with all of this is that we confuse outcomes with processes. The actual technical processes of analyzing e-mail or analyzing anything for that matter, using computers, is actually quite simple and has been around - well, we started in 1998. I'd say it was immature in 1998, but in 2000 it was well on the way."