I don’t particularly like e-mail, not because it is bad per se, but because we have made it into a one-size-fits-all collaboration and communication tool. I have particular dislikes for the misuse of the cc button and the very existence of the bcc button, something I have written about before.
Even those dislikes pale into insignificance when compared to my public enemy number one, the infinite-loop mail. This is where person A sends an e-mail, say, to eight people named B to I. B drops A and C from the conversation and adds J and K. C meantime adds J as well, but drops B and brings A back.
This seems to happen regularly in large institutions, and we create all kinds of horizontal bureaucracies as a result, looping endlessly.
Kishore Balakrishnan, commenting on an earlier post of mine, mused about implementing ticketing systems for e-mail in environments where everyone could see the size of the queue, open items, turnaround times, the lot. Others have tried paying for attention at the same time as dealing with spam, using techniques like Seriosity suggests.
Some of these issues came up in conversation today, and it reminded me of some principles I tripped over many decades ago.
The first was in a world before I had corporate e-mail, I’m talking about 1981. [Others may have had access to such things, but my first memory of using serious corporate e-mail was in 1986 at Data General as part of their Comprehensive Electronic Office (CEO) offering. While I had played with personal e-mail, I did not have a computer at home, so it mattered not.
So, in this world before e-mail, someone old and wise decided they’d teach me a bit about office politics and how to survive them. Things like: Don’t appear in announcements, they’re just like drawing large Xs on your back and saying “Kill me”. Try not to have an office, it confuses the daylights out of the plotters and schemers. Smoke (it was OK in those days).
When it came to interoffice memos (the pieces of paper you sent around in those bright orange envelopes with 20 address boxes and, occasionally, a string you had to tie round a circular tab thingie) the advice I was given was as follows:
1. Memos are always to be drafted by the recipient. She is the person who knows best what to put in the memo.
2. The recipient also chooses the sender of the memo. Again, she is best placed to decide.
3. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to convince the chosen sender to sign the said memo. This is usually done by offering to trade. In exchange for the signature, you offer to get him a memo (drafted by him, of course) and signed by the person he chooses.
Sound overly cynical? It’s not meant to be. Just observations about enterprise life.
Today, when I recalled this, some other thoughts came into my mind. A separate conversation, this time about EDI and Edifact and SITPRO, discussing the evolution of automation of trade documents. Again in 1981, another wise person said to me, as if we were in a murder mystery tale, “who stands to gain? Who benefits from the standardisation and automation? Find the beneficiary and you will have someone motivated to implement the application. For it to work, EDI must be beneficiary-led.”
Who benefits? Who stands to gain? These are questions we have to ask ourselves as designers. But actually we know the answer. It should always be “the customer”. So now we have to keep asking ourselves “How does the customer benefit from what I am doing?”.
As we get better at answering that question, we will build systems that are genuinely designed from the customer perspective.
JP, Openness could be the answer:
1. the corporate intranet could open with links to internal WikiNews and internal WikiCircular (‘anyone can edit’) for anything that is likely to be forwarded in an endless loop; it may as well be shared openly.
2. anything that is not meant for a wider audience could by default, be disabled from being forwarded or being included in the reply; ‘cut and paste’ could also be disabled or tagged in red with a warning.
3. meanwhile, a beginning could be made with a default time delay in the outbox, so that people can check again to see if they really do need to send all those emails to all those people.
Ah but JP, “…it should always be the customer…”
Well yes. Obviously. But clearly in most large organizations – except for the people at the very top, and hopefully some of the people on the ‘front line’ (ie dealing directly and constantly with said customers) – the answer is very rarely “the customer”. Call it the (large) enterprise tragedy of the commons: clearly all companies need customers to survive, but in sufficiently large/established companies, most employees ‘in the middle’ can safely assume that inertia, reputation, market position, mean that the ‘installed’ base of customers exists and is ‘captured’, so the rational operator asks the ‘Who stands to gain’ question framed in such a way that the answer is ‘me’, ‘my team’ or possibly ‘my department/division’… Of course this is unsustainable over time but that timeline is usually safely longer than the employee’s horizon. Ironically, even when decline sets in, there is a better than 50/50 chance that this behavior accelerates as the employees decide whether or not it is better to ‘get what you can while you can’ (looting) rather than ‘get back to basics’ (serving their customers.) Taking the ‘looting’ fork generally happens if they think the company’s structure and culture is irredeemably corrupted. Worse there is not alot even a smart and motivated CEO can do to fix this. Giant corporations imo are becoming analogous to the super-fauna of old – as the environment changes they are impossibly configured to adapt and at the same time risk collapsing under their own massive weight that their ‘skeletal structure’ can no longer support. And the rodents survive and prosper… Ah thank goodness for creative destruction (otherwise we really would be doomed!)
‘mega-fauna’ sorry
JP, Sean: again, Openness (http://conversationhub.com/2008/06/19/oliver-marks-on-openness-at-supernova/ ) could be the answer to the ‘Who gains’ question and the ‘to loot or not to loot’ problem. I have been part of small teams as well as ‘mega fauna’ and agree with Sean on the ‘tragedy of the commons’- the agency problem?
However, perhaps we are seeing the emerging convergence of technology, strategic intent and stakeholder participation- using Openness to work for the ultimate goal of maximising value to the customer- thus maximising shareholder value too. JP, your argument that ‘if you keep cost of failures low, big companies…can be as flexible as small ones’ is very true.
hey JP,
I am an avid reader of your blog, the most interesting part apart from your content is the kind of Jargon and complex sentences i find in your blog and comments of the readers…
Sample the Sean’s sentence
” Call it the (large) enterprise tragedy of the commons: clearly all companies need customers to survive, but in sufficiently large/established companies, most employees ‘in the middle’ can safely assume that inertia, reputation, market position, mean that the ‘installed’ base of customers exists and is ‘captured’, so the rational operator asks the ‘Who stands to gain’ question framed in such a way that the answer is ‘me’, ‘my team’ or possibly ‘my department/division’… Of course this is unsustainable over time but that timeline is usually safely longer than the employee’s horizon.”
your blog
“EDI and Edifact and SITPRO, discussing the evolution of automation of trade documents.”
half the time i am googling and using wikipedia, but somethings still remain, like the “rational operator” in Sean’s sentence.
I understand i am ignorant in many ways, but what is the way out?
Your links to wikipedia are a great help for a start.
Harsha, this is an important issue, but one that has a simple solution. We all need to get better at not using jargon, and where we use any unusual terms, we should explain the terms either directly (using words) or indirectly (via a hyperlink).
Sean’s use of “rational operator” is not meant to be jargon or unusual, he just meant a normal rational person. Economists love rational human beings… I should know, I’m one. But have I ever met a rational human being? Different question.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/6qakk2
please see link for Heather Havenstein’s report on Enterprise 2.0 in the CIA and DIA- “using Intellipedia, a Wikipedia-like project for its analysts and spies…Despite the early challenges, the CIA now has users on its top secret, secret and sensitive unclassified networks reading and editing a central wiki that has been enhanced with a YouTube-like video channel, a Flickr-like photo-sharing feature, content tagging, blogs and RSS feeds…Intellipedia is built with the same open-source software as Wikipedia, and anyone with access on the various networks can read the posts. Only those users verified as authentic users can edit the content…Web 2.0 has allowed us to create new avenues of dialogue, to allow new ideas to emerge.”
JP, Openness in big organisations!