We Live in E/Mail… It’s Official

According to research firm IDC, E/Mail , as most knowledge workers will agree,  is the most time-consuming activity, followed closely by creating documents, then comes searching for and interpreting information. Email consumes an average of 14.5 hours per week per knowledge worker. This is not surprising, given that E/Mail it is the major tool used for collaboration and for sharing information.

Email is often used as a transport mechanism for documents as part of a workflow system with document workflow such as sales, operations support and other business processes.

Searching for and analyzing information both consume 24% of the typical information worker’s time (9.5 and 9.6 hours per week, respectively).

Any improvements that an organization can make which result in reducing the time spent living in E/Mail will have immediate financial payback.

Infrastructure Benefit Types

Much of the work I am doing involves estimating the benefits from infrastructure technology, this is not a straightforward task given that most of infrastructure is invisible to the end user (and it should be!). There are many way of attempting this, some more complicated then others (usually requiring military grade spreadsheets!), but for me keeping this simple is the key.

I have created a set of what I call “Benefit Pillars”. These are the types or classes of benefits that you can expect from an investment in IT infrastructure.

Here they are:

Risk – how can this investment help an organisation to improve the way specific risks can be managed or mitigated?
Cost – how can this investment help an organisation to avoid or offset specific costs? useful to include time-frames and monetary values where possible since this is primarily an economic indicator.
Functionality -  how can this investment help an organisation to improve the functionality of an existing capability or initiative? useful to give examples of how this improvement will improve usability of a user application and improve end user experience & effectiveness through improved functionality.
Service Delivery – how can this investment help an organisation to improve the way it delivers service both from an IT perspective and from a business perspective?