...from: http://www.umanitoba.ca/ist/gartner/intraweb/research/121200/121276/ 121276.html

How to Stop the Destructive Overuse of E-Mail   8 June 2004   Nikos Drakos    Maurene Caplan Grey

Excessive dependence on e-mail threatens to destroy valuable organizational knowledge. Attention to human factors, usability and flexibility is key to shifting e-mail traffic to appropriate systems.

E-mail has become end users' tool of choice for ad hoc communication and carrying out more-complex coordination, collaboration and management activities. Aside from its negative effect on productivity, unchecked e-mail growth will endanger valuable organizational knowledge. To attract users to more-natural, activity-specific alternatives, enterprises must give special attention to human factors, usability and flexibility concerns — especially where alternatives to e-mail are already in place but underused. In the long term, excessive reliance on e-mail is likely to be symptomatic of inflexible business processes.

Analysis The ease of use, ubiquity and flexibility of e-mail have made it the most-popular tool for person-to-person communication. But even a casual examination of a typical inbox reveals usage patterns that go far beyond simple communication. E-mail is used for activity coordination and management tasks (for example, scheduling meetings or tracking progress), group discussions and decision making, finding people or distributing information. Furthermore, these e-mail-based collaboration, coordination and discovery patterns typically are present across the spectrum of business processes.

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Short-Term Remedies for Excessive Dependence on E-Mail

Many enterprises have already deployed tools that provide explicit support for common communication, coordination and collaboration patterns — for example, virtual meetings, shared spaces, discussion forums and project management. Such support may be available through specific collaboration products, or as part of a broader intranet or portal deployment.

Short-term remedies for excessive e-mail dependence are underused. There are many reasons why users rely too much on e-mail instead of various, more-specific alternatives — but there are just as many tactics and strategies to reverse this overreliance.

The first reason for users' aversion to alternative communication and coordination tools is that they're often unaware of such tools and have received inadequate end-user training. This is the place to start remediation. Enterprises are increasingly developing e-mail productivity training programs, which include technologies and usage standards (see "Making E-Mail More Productive"). Any such program should include specific guidelines about when to use e-mail as opposed to alternatives such as instant messaging, Web conferencing or another enterprise communication infrastructure. Training can be delivered via various channels: • Just-in-time training — for example, short videos that can be included as part of the desktop software image • Lists of top-10 e-mail usage standards, distributed to employees on laminated cards • E-mail productivity management training

Next, there are important human issues to consider, such as cultivating trust, recognizing and satisfying privacy concerns, and encouraging participation. The last item — encouraging participation — usually requires an enterprise to rethink employee incentives and rewards to overcome natural information-hoarding tendencies, as well as a natural aversion to discipline. Without active leadership, encouragement and appropriate responses to human issues, users will continue to prefer the almost-private world of e-mail.

E-mail gives users control over who they trade information with and how, as opposed to other forums or applications in which users lose control of their contributions on submission. This is especially problematic in cases where the rules of engagement (that is, who can access a contribution or what they can do with it) are unclear or not enforced. Trust is a belief system. Enterprises should support communication mechanisms that take an individual's "trust levels" into consideration (see "Choose the Right Communication Channel to Build Trust").

A third reason for users' aversion to alternative communication and coordination tools is the poor usability and inflexibility of alternate e-mail tools.

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E-mail traffic growth can be one of the obvious symptoms of inflexible or inappropriate business processes that force employees to broadcast or cascade messages to increasingly larger numbers of co-workers. Such bursts of e-mail traffic can be a force for good, however, as long as they're used to identify and rectify a broken process or exploit a new opportunity. Unfortunately, too many enterprises treat only the symptoms (in some extreme cases, they ban the use of e-mail) and fail to recognize the fundamental causes of and appropriate responses to problems.

============================= iPods pose security risk for enterprises, Gartner says By Laura Rohde, IDG News Service July 06, 2004 9:20 am ET

The iPod may be popular, but also poses such a major security risk for businesses, that enterprises should seriously consider banning the iPod and other portable storage devices, according to a study by research firm Gartner Inc.

The devices, using a Universal Serial Bus (USB) or FireWire (IEEE 1394), present risks to businesses on several fronts: from introducing malicious code into a corporate network, to being used to steal corporate data, the Stamford, Conn.-based research company said in its report "How to Tackle the Threat From Portable Storage Devices," published Friday.

The report pointed to a variety of devices, including pocket-sized portable FireWire hard drives, like those from LaCie Group SA or Toshiba Corp., or USB hard drives or keychain drives, such as the DiskOnKey from M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers Ltd. Gartner also named disk-based MP3 players, like Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod, as a security risk as well as digital cameras with smart media cards, memory sticks and compact flash.

Gartner advised companies to forbid employees and external contractors with direct access to corporate networks from using these privately owned devices with corporate PCs. Companies should also consider a "desktop lockdown policy," disabling universal plug and play functions after installing desired drivers, to permit the use of only authorized devices.

The report conceded that the devices themselves can be quite useful within corporations, making it "unpractical and counterproductive" to introduce an outright ban.

Companies should take a multipronged approach to portable storage devices, Gartner said, including using personal firewalls to limit what can be done on USB ports. The use of products for selectively controlling ports and encrypting data should also be considered, the company said. Additionally, digital rights management technology should also be used by enterprises that want to protect intellectual property, Gartner said.