Email: Unsticking the Glue

Two Personal Perspectives on a Global Phenomenon

For me, the tipping point happened right around 1992-93 maybe. Until then, we had been using little "chat" programs to send short text messages to one another on our office LAN. Useful. Limited. Sort of cool. But having a public email address—that you put on business cards and everything—was still pretty exotic. In fact, I thought it was kinda pretentious. "Ooooh, he must be a high-tech god. He's got an email address."

Then pretty soon I had one, too. So did you. And this is the tipping point I'm thinking of: One day, I realized that my job had transformed. I no longer did what I used to do (whatever that was). From that moment forward, my job became sending, receiving and replying to email.

It wasn't really, of course. It just felt that way. Still does, some days. But everyone has arrived at the same conclusion: At some point, this little point-to-point communications tool—the telegraph of the Internet—became the central medium for the interchange of business transactions, personal interaction and mass cultural awareness. It's not just that business relies on it; our relationships to friends and family have also been irrevocably altered. Not necessarily improved, mind you. But damn sure changed forever.

 "No question about it: Email has become the glue that holds business together, both within organizations and between organizations. It's the de facto business communication standard in the world today, more so than anything else." That's Bob Little, vice president of product marketing at ZANTAZ, speaking. Bob and I were talking about "email management," a term that was probably never heard much before the year 2000 or so, if then. And if you heard it before then, you were in the file-server lab of one of the biggest companies in the world, and you were starting to get annoyed at the storage space this "email thing" was starting to consume. And by "email management," you meant "how do we get rid of it."

"Business was caught by surprise, and turned a blind eye to what email meant," says Little. "The problems and solutions that came down the pike were based upon the willful ignorance of email's impact. It grew beyond where anybody thought it would grow."

Originally, managing email and the costs associated with it was a backroom activity; IT took care of that. Suddenly, organizations realized they were spending an incredible amount of money on the infrastructure required to support this massively growing phenomenon. IT's reaction was, as always, to minimize the impact, and their options were limited: They either bought more servers and hardware, thus running the costs up, or they restricted everyone's mailbox to an unacceptably small size. "I know organizations that today limit mailboxes to 50 megabytes," claims Bob. "I can fill that in a couple days. And that's the way many organizations are still managing it. They haven't thought proactively about mail management systems as cost benefits."

Hmm. Email management, the cost cow of the early 21st century, is a benefit? I had to check the tape recorder for that one. Yep, that's what he said.

"There's real ROI in mail management," Little insists. "There are gains in productivity, for the people who don't have to police themselves and spend all their time deleting mail messages. They're able to find things more cost effectively. Plus you don't have to buy more storage hardware. Granted, the cost of storage always goes down, but the volume always goes up!"

Email, says Bob, is one of those applications that are "mission-critical, but not a core competence." Like carpeting, I suggested. "Well, sort of. No one wants to devote an inordinate amount of time and effort to their email systems. They just need it, and want it to work. It's just like any other infrastructure: you have to have it, and you expect there to be some cost, but it's not what your business is all about." See...like carpeting.

I point out that other infrastructural elements, like networking or wireless, or like telephones, don't need to meet the same cost-justification standards as email, and that it didn't seem quite fair. "We see that more in Europe than here, because of the different regulatory cultures," replies Bob. "Overseas, the focus is still on ways to cost effectively support their email system, because they know it provides them a competitive advantage. Here, that's important, too, but compliance requirements are driving a lot of infrastructure decisions. They don't want to do it foolishly—but they DO want a system that will achieve their compliance needs."

And as we continued to talk, it became clearer that the stature of email as the "glue of business" comes with a price: If it's all that dang important, it better get to work all over the organization. "People definitely expect the same infrastructure, which they bought a few years ago for cost-efficiency, to also meet other requirements," agrees Little.

So, in my way of turning everything into a binary, on-or-off, black-or-white proposition, I ask whether customers of email management systems see themselves as (a.) responding to the fear factor of discovery requests and compliance, or (b.) seeking the value-creation that he described the Europeans as favoring?

"It's not that clear-cut," he replies. "Organizations realize that all these things are part of the same conversation. They can cost-justify and get benefit just from the IT perspective alone. But they can ALSO improve their processes in the other areas."