The Observer looks at whether email is a broken business tool:
The deluge of email flooding workers' inboxes every day has become so overwhelming that it is now a 'broken business tool' in urgent need of fixing, companies have been warned.
The average employee spends an estimated 90 minutes to two hours a day wading through hundreds of messages, suffering interruptions and distractions with every ping from their PC or BlackBerry. Worldwide email traffic has now hit 196 billion messages a day, according to the research firm the Radicati Group, and is predicted to reach 374 billion per day by 2011.
Some organisations, such as worldwide accountancy consultants Deloitte and the publisher Cedar, have held 'No email days' to encourage staff to use the phone or talk to each other instead. But these are only stopgap measures.
'Email is a broken business tool,' said Jason Preston, new media manager at the Parnassus Group, a social media consultancy. 'There's been no innovation to separate the junk letters from the real ones.'
Read more here.
