"William J. Hobler, Jr" <bhobler@worldnet.att.net> made several
excellent points and concluded with:
>Now I am sure that there are many more rules that could be set. The above
>are focused on decisions. How about focusing on technical details.
>...
>The cause of too much e-mail is people send too much e-mail, it is not a
>technology issue. There have to be leadership strategies that get an
>organization to the right amount of e-mail.
I had to run an eMail pollution task force. We had created a monster by
enabling people to send out material to "everyone". We had to make the
"everyone" option harder so that receivers would not be subjected to the
bad judgement of senders. It worked well. The problem we were dealing with
was the tendency of people to read their eMail even thogh these same
people would never read the newspaper from cover to cover. We had no
choice but to restrict the input to them to maintain productivity. Just
opening and rejecting an item was bringing them down. Some people were
getting 40 new messages every day and their jobs were to be in front of
customers not PCs...
Some of my consulting involves coaching people to accept "good enough" in
their endeavours because they care too much and it is drowning them in
their concerns for excellence. Some things warrant attention but lots do
not. This selectivity seems to be tougher for people as they get deluged
with information and requests in our "global village".
Bill starts to define the elements of an intelligent agent. I did some
early work on agents in 1989. It takes quite a bit of experimentation to
get the filters right but they can help immensely. It does tend to turn us
all into programmers, though. Bill's logic is just a set of program steps.
Like any new technology, the overwhelm stage preceeds the management
stage. Banning Cell Phones in restaurants is a sample of a rampant
technology at its stage one management. We had rules for when to use the
phone after eMail was stuck in a loop, and when a personal meeting was
mandatory. The amazing thing was that smart people were unable to figure
this out on their own...
For the fun of it! ... Keith
K. Cowan (72212.51@compuserve.com) Created on 4/7/97 at 2:33 PM (PDT)
--Keith Cowan <72212.51@CompuServe.COM>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>