Why Hasn't Email Management Taken Off?

I was looking at the group registrations this morning for our InformationZen social networking site.  For those unfamiliar with the site, it's an online networking site for those interested in document, content, records, and business process management.  Registration is free. 

Anyway... I was looking at the registration numbers for the various groups on the site.  Here they are:

What struck me in all this is the group with the fewest registrations -- email management.  (Note:  This rough pattern is also present in the registrations for our training program.)

My question:

Why hasn't e-mail management becoming the killer app in the document management space?

I have thought for some time that email (mis)management was the issue that would finally launch organizations into taking a more serious looking at how they manage their documents and information. 

Why?

In a nutshell, email is a microcosm of the DIGITAL LANDFILL that exists in most organizations....

• We all have it.
• For most of us, what we are doing is an ungodly mess.
• We certainly have no shortage of evidence of the risks of mismanagement -- just take a look at a newspaper.
• Lack of a strategy is pushing storage costs higher and higher as the volume of information explodes.
• Lack of a strategy is taking a productivity toll as organizations try to pretend they are collaborating by sending around endless volumes of attachments.

So my question again -- why not post a comment?...

Why hasn't e-mail management become the killer app in the DM space?

Comments

[bex]

good question... maybe because until recently, very few people recognized it as a problem worthy of much concern. It would have been nice to have better email archive tools, but why spend the money?

I think the eDiscovery driver has suddenly made people aware of how expensive clutter can be... thus creating demand for better tools to manage and reduce the clutter.

We'll see if the ECM vendors can step up to the plate... I have my own biases, of course.

[John de Boer]

A killer app is a solution, not an outstanding problem or opportunity - the killer app for email has yet to arrive.

Outlook dominates the business scene, and Microsoft's email RM strategy still leaves end users manually classifying their messages. Third-party tools that permit things like tagging may help a little, but they're not a substitute for a consistent, organization-wide classification system, and all end users are still forced to be records clerks.

The paradigm is wrong. Funnelling diverse business activities through the narrow portal of an Outlook application means these records must be sorted back out into their functions at the end of the day. We are creating work for ourselves.

If Microsoft adopted a fundamentally different model for Outlook, it would change the landscape overnight...

[shirley]

We also aware of the importance of email management and developed a tool integrated with Outlook that allows document and email management. There is more information on this at http://www.nsynergy.com/Products/myDocs/Pages/About_myDocs.aspx or please email me at Mark.Davis@nsynergy.com if you want more information.