If email is dead, why is there so much of it?

It's common to hear these days--in the age of social computing--that email is dead, but if that's the case why are enterprises reportedly drowning in high volumes of it? The fact is that when people say email is dead, what they usually mean is that it's become such a clogged communication channel that it's hardly worth using if you really want to get in touch with somebody quickly. They also mean that as a result of uncontrolled (or at least under-controlled) Spam, the problem is even worse.

Email in the enterprise

As a self-employed freelance writer, I don't spend a lot of time inside large companies, but I have friends who do and they report that email is used to basically cover your behind. You send an email to your colleague explaining your reasoning for using Verdana instead of Arial and CC the 40 people on the default font committee, their bosses and so forth. You attach a Word document, which gets sent to the same 100-odd people. You multiply this out thousands of times a day across a global organization, and you have mountains of email, much of it repeated with attachments being passed back and forth.

Unfortunately, storage space today is so cheap, that at a certain level, it doesn't matter to IT how many times the same document gets stored on the email servers, but from a practical, content-management standpoint, at some point, you need to find a way to weed these out and store only one copy of the email and attachment (or better yet use a collaboration platform that distributes a pointer to the document instead of the document itself; more on this later).

Email and eDiscovery

The issue becomes even more pronounced when you start dealing with eDiscovery. Imagine getting an eDiscovery order for all the emails related to X for a three month period. I have a friend who works at a large company that reports getting several thousand emails a week and he's just one of thousands of employees. How can IT manage all of this under normal circumstances, never mind try to find all of the emails related to one particular incident? It's a daunting task and companies need to find ways to minimize the amount of email and have archiving and disposal systems in place before the order comes to produce emails as part of an evidence request.

Getting more social

This brings us back to the idea that email is dead. In a sense it is. How can any of us keep up with the sheer volume? One way to minimize the email problem is to get more social. By using collaboration tools, micro-blogging, wikis and so forth, we can begin to shift communication and reduce the amount of information floating around inside the enterprise emails servers.

Email isn't going away, any more than the telephone went away when email became popular, but by trying to refocus communication to alternate channels, companies can reduce the amount of email, transferring the content management problem to another place, but ultimately streamlining communication in the enterprise. Email may not be dead, but it's not resting very comfortably and we need to find ways to alleviate its pain. - Ron