Recent news of Gmail’s loss of service in
This is not the question organisations should be asking, the real issue is should a business rely on email for real time transactions? The rise of email over the past decade is seen as being a huge benefit to the way businesses communicate however there is a basic problem with the technology.
Email, like real mail, is a “store and forward” technology assuming that delays and failures are an acceptable part of the service. This core assumption has been overlooked and most organisations have grown on an assumption that email is a “fault tolerant transactional system”. Large organisations spend millions of dollars trying to ensure that their email service is always up. Woe betide any IT department who allows the email system to fail – especially with those senior executives wandering the corridors looking for sacrificial lambs .
In fact in one organisation I was involved with I suggested that the email servers be allocated on a hierarchical basis so that executive and senior manager’s email could be protected to a higher level than the rest of the organisation!
This business assumption is flawed, in the past organisations built procedural checks and balances around the delays and losses in the mail system and we need to do the same. We need to disconnect primary business transactions from email, I know it sounds hard but trust me an email system is no way to guarantee service to your customers.
ADVICE: Ensure that email is not used in your organisation as a transactional system between you and your customers and suppliers – if in doubt just use the phone! :-)
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I kind of agree. Email is definitely store and forward and for business transactions that don't need to be real-time then it's perfect. I totally agree that a lot of people's expectations towards email is becoming similar to the telephone, it’s always working and it’s immediate communication. Obviously email is not that in fact one area you didn’t touch on was the security of email (which in 99% of the time there isn’t any).
ReplyDeleteIf done well, with aligned expectations, email is a good tool for businesses. However for large organisations that are building transactional systems based on email I totally agree with your argument. In this day and age there are so many more simple (but secure and real-time) technologies.
My perspective is that most companies are scared of the devil they don’t know. They latch on to a certain technology not realising that in most cases (these days) it can often be cheaper to dump a legacy system and replace it with the latest rather than to make-it-fit as they progressively increase their requirements. I can hear a distant voice whisper, where is their technology plan?