Making email productive

            
             6 billion business e-mail messages sent worldwide in 2001, it is impossible to deny that e-mail is one of the most successful tools ever invented. .
             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. .
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             Of the remaining messages, a mere 12% were business related and only 3% required attention. .
             In order to identify the 3% of e-mail that require attention, he must manually sift through the 97% of remaining clutter. Even when he identifies the valuable e-mail, he is not provided with any productivity tools to make it easier and quicker to process them, for example easy access to the data that he needs to respond or prepared template responses.
             Not only have too many communications been passed along to the user, but often at inappropriate times and there is no assessment of value and hence priority placed on those that have passed through.
             While just about any user of e-mail will recognize these problems, attempts to ameliorate the problems have generally been restricted to manual procedures. Hence while 70% of companies have some sort of e-mail policy, rarely can this policy be implemented or monitored in a meaningful way.