Is email a broken business tool?

Both the Guardian and the Telegraph have picked up on a report from an obscure social networking consultancy claiming that email is a “broken business tool”.

The deluge of email flooding workers’ inboxes every day has become so overwhelming that it is now a ‘broken business tool’ in urgent need of fixing, companies have been warned.

The average employee spends an estimated 90 minutes to two hours a day wading through hundreds of messages, suffering interruptions and distractions with every ping from their PC or BlackBerry. Worldwide email traffic has now hit 196 billion messages a day, according to the research firm the Radicati Group, and is predicted to reach 374 billion per day by 2011.

Some organisations, such as worldwide accountancy consultants Deloitte and the publisher Cedar, have held ‘No email days’ to encourage staff to use the phone or talk to each other instead. But, it is claimed. these are only stopgap measures.

The story caught my attention as I grapple with the spam settings on our email server. At tutor2u, we get 500+ emails per day; sometimes many more at business times of the year. I’m guessing that over 50% of these are spam, despite our best efforts to tweak the spam filters to capture the obvious offenders.

Its a tricky business. A few weeks ago, we were getting dozens of spam emails trying to sell anti-spam software! (along with other discounted software). So we set the spam filter to bounce emails containing key anti-spam terms. The result? The spam emails largely dried up. however, our spam filter started to bounce genuine emails from customers and contacts whose email system contained messages at the foot of messages saying that the message had been cleared by their own spam & virus software. You can’t win!

So, as a business tool, is email broken?

I’m not convinced. We couldn’t operate without it. I can’t live without my Blackberry! We suffer our fair share of spam, but get by without spending all day handling it. Maybe we just need to learn how to manage it better.