Earlier this year, I ran across an interesting post on the CIO website talking about IT services firm Atos Origin and their battle against productivity losses due to email overload. 

A couple of weeks ago it came up again with stories from ABC News, Techcrunch, Business Insider, and even Engadget.  The hook?  CEO Thierry Breton wants to eliminate email entirely and move people over to social collaboration tools, exit messages, phone calls, and face to face meetings (!).

I do agree that email overload is a real issue and has resulted in some really off the wall behavior: 

• volume bragging - "I've been on a tear, getting 1000 emails a day"
• wrestling competitions - "Hit Inbox zero today"
• admissions of failure - "Finally gave up and just declared email bankruptcy. Deleted everything and starting from scratch."

However, killing email is probably a little extreme. 

One area where email is out of control is notifications for IT teams.  The xMatters Advisors team spends a lot of time talking to large enterprises about how they manage their IT environments, and in particular the communication approaches they use to engage people to take actions (fix stuff, approve things) and to give people a heads up (service outages, change windows).

A common element that we've observed is that there is a LOT of email traffic internal to the IT teams and a fair amount that is sent outside the team about what's happening with IT services.  Here's some common complaints:

• I'm on an email distro for IT alerts and get so many that I just ignore them (or have a rule that redirects them to a folder I never look at)
• We send emails out but for important stuff have to follow up with a text or phone call to actually make something happen
• When we get emails, we can't do anything with the messages themselves.  We have to call someone to approve a change or confirm that we're working on the issue. 
• We have to power up a laptop to get connected to the system that sent the email to figure out what's really going on
• We get emails for stuff on the weekend even when we're not on call
• IT doesn't let us know what's going on.  We're kept in the dark about what's going on.
• IT keeps sending us so many emails about what's going on that we just ignore all of them now.

In my view, the core of the problem isn't email itself.  It's how we use email, rely on it exclusively, and treat it like a one way communication channel.

When we deliver an IT relevance engine to a client, there are a lot of benefits that directly address this email overload problem:

• Individuals get fewer emails because they pass through many filters to ensure that communications only get sent to the people that should get it, based on schedule, on call rules, escalation structure, location, etc.
• When time is of the essence, either bypass email entirely, or use it just for a backup.  Primary communication switches over to SMS / text messages, or automated phone calls.
• Enable people to respond to the messages they receive in context of the issue and their role in the organization. Examples: I'll take the incident ticket, this change request needs more detail about impact, I'll be on the war room conference call in 15min, etc.
• Provide mobile access to IT management tools so whether you need to just get more information before making a decision, or you want to start working for wherever you are, you can do so quickly and using any smartphone or tablet at your disposal.

If you read any of the articles about the challenges at Atos Origin and thought you have the same type of problems in your IT organization, you might find this information on IT relevance engines useful.

If you're an existing xMatters client and have seen these benefits come to life at your company, feel free to share stories.

And finally, here's a Monday morning challenge:  If you record a video of yourself saying the following phrase (or a creative alternative), I'll make sure you get some awesome xMatters schwag for the holidays. Limited to first 20 responders who post as comments or to info@xmatters.com.

"If you're having notification problems I feel bad for you son, I got a relevance engine so I got none"

And yes, I realize that the grammatical structure of that phrase is far from perfect, but I have rules to comply with: Jay-Z 99 Problems

Abbas Haider Ali.