BRYAN'S BLOG

Food for Thought V1: Mastering Inbox Fatigue

Food for Thought is a new service from RMP which supplements RMP’s Risk e-Views monthly newsletter. Once a month you will receive Food for Thought – a high level summary of a paper I have read that I think you will find interesting.



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The first whitepaper I have chosen to highlight is a double edged sword for me. It covers a major cause of staff non-productivity – too many emails to get the real work done – which I am guilty of contributing to right now! The paper is by IDC and it is titled “The Future of Email is Social“. In a nutshell it covers:

  • The foundations of email which continue to be its strength today
  • A comprehensive description of the growing email challenge which includes its impact on staff productivity and its inefficiency in knowledge sharing and transfer when compared to social media
  • How vendors of email software are increasingly bringing the core benefits of social media software into their email program offerings
  • The outstanding challenge for enterprise systems providers to include “context” into the functionality. That is auto filtering out or auto adding in information to a conversation by email, instant messaging or while collaborating online, through one’s location, job role, project responsibilities, personal development needs, interests and of course expertise

For me the paper highlights the need for risk professionals to be cognisant of the impact of email on the overall productivity of your organisation and the solutions being developed. It may be one of those sleeping strategic risks that if managed well, could put you in front of the competition and if managed poorly, could leave you well behind and playing catchup.