Ironically, it is e-mail’s very popularity that creates a new challenge. As both the style of usage and sheer volume grows, the ability of end users to identify and respond to valued business issues is severely hampered. In fact, according to Gartner Group:

· One third of internal business e-mail is unnecessary

· Employees spend an average of 49 minutes a day managing e-mail

· Almost a quarter of employees spend more than an hour a day managing e-mail

· Only 27 percent of e-mail that employees get demands immediate attention.

Take, for instance, this snapshot of an Amacis employee’s inbox. Recognizing that he is drowning in unproductive e-mail, he has turned on the junk mail filter feature within Microsoft Outlook. This feature has allowed him to weed out 37 of his 128 new messages.

However, he is left with the significant problem of sifting through 81 messages in order to identify and respond to the important ones.

Of the remaining messages, a mere 12% were business related and only 3% required attention.

The appropriate policies for processing e-mail, individual, department, and division, will be different. For example, how the e-mail of a senior executive is handled is almost certainly going to be different to how the e-mail of a back office department function such as accounts should be handled.

In choosing appropriate policies for dealing with e-mail, we need to focus not just on the costs, but also the perceived value of the e-mail. While costs are fairly easy to assess, the value of an e-mail depends on its context. For example, an e-mail from a supplier, copied to a number of different contact points within our organization, changing the payment terms may be of “high interest and hence value” to the treasury function, but will be probably of minimal value to a marketeer.

The policies must fit the needs of your organization not just as a whole, but of each constituent element of your institution.

Few organizations have any clear understanding of what e-mail they receive, who processes it, the cost of processing nor the real value to the organization.

In 2001, there were 361 million business e-mail users ; therefore, worldwide, the e-mail problem is costing businesses approximately $577.6 billion in lost productivity for 2001. With worldwide daily business e-mail volumes expected to grow from 9.6 billion today to 22.2 billion in 2005 (a compound annual growth rate of 23%), the amount of wasted

Some topics in this essay:
Principles Track, Neil McDonald, Microsoft Outlook, Introduction E-mail, Productivity Tools, business e-mail, value e-mail, managing e-mail ·, day managing e-mail, depends context example, business units teams, e-mail ·, example e-mail, day managing, business units, managing e-mail, processing e-mail, depends context, employees spend,