Costs and Benefits of ICT

We live in an information age and a knowledge economy - but what price do we pay for instantaneous communication?

This story from the BBC claims that as much as half of workers’ time is spent dealing with emails.

But is this necessarily a bad thing?

Emails are quicker than writing memos and speaking to people in person; it also facilitates faster response to clients and customers and can help to pass on information quickly and - just as importantly - extremely cheaply. Problems seem to arise when there is overdependence on email, particularly where a face-to-face (or even telephone) conversation would create a faster and more satisfying exchange. But does this simply reflect a change in which we do business. A story claiming workers spend half their day talking on the telephone or with colleagues would certainly appear less controversial!

But if workers are spending hours clearing irrelevant (or even incendiary!) emails from their inboxes then obviously productivity could be harmed. Apparently we spend, on average, 52 hours a year clearing spam emails alone. In extreme cases, staff claim that too many emails cause stress.

City accountancy firm Deloitte found its employees had a problem with e-mail overload.

So it came up with a radical solution.

“A lot of people complain they get too much e-mail, that they’re swamped with it, a lot of the messages they receive are unwanted, unnecessary targeted to the wrong people,” says Mary Hensher, who heads Deloitte’s IT department.

“We all tried to see if we could avoid sending internal e-mail on a Wednesday. Now the first thing that happened was it got everybody talking.

“Everybody started to think about what they were sending, who they were sending it to and whether they could use another method instead of sending the e-mail. So it had a very good immediate response, where people were actually thinking more about what they were doing.”

Economies and businesses grow, in part, due to improvements in the quality of management and entrepreneurship. Rethinking email and similar applications could have important implications for productivity, benefitting us all in the long-run.