December 27, 2000, 9:49 AM —
ANYONE WHO HAS
spent time on the technology watch knows how often "paradigm shifts" and "new industrial revolutions" are announced -- and how seldom they actually come to pass.In August 1992, CIO ran a story describing a change in the architectures that supported and defined e-mail. The article pointed out that as a result, opportunities might arise "to enhance a variety of business activities." This mild forecast turned out to be true in the same sense that Noah's meteorologist could claim points for predicting scattered showers.
Up through the '80s, e-mail was not a central concern of CIOs. For all but the largest or most technical companies, e-mail was outsourced to dialup message switching services such as CompuServe or MCIMail. E-mail services were expensive (often 20 cents or more a message), dial-up connections measured out their bandwidth in teaspoons, and the software was primitive and inconvenient. Sending mail between messaging services was especially burdensome, often requiring the faultless entry of huge address strings. There was an alternative called the Internet, but it was of interest mostly to Unix junkies.
The point of the article was that all these walls were coming down at once. Enterprises were installing local-area networks, which meant they could take their internal e-mail traffic in-house and deliver it for free over their own (relatively) high-bandwidth Ethernet networks. New standards such as Microsoft's object linking and embedding (OLE) made it possible to attach various types of files and multimedia to messages. Companies were building gateways that handled the job of routing calls among messaging services and even over the Internet without demanding the sender have a degree in computer science. Taken together, these developments "promise to bring electronic mail to its full potential as a strategic information-handling resource," we concluded soberly.
As it turned out, e-mail emerged like one of those volcanoes that pop up in the fields and surprise Mexican farmers: One day there's steam curling up out of the corn patch, and a year later a lava-drooling mountain is raining fire on the countryside. That's e-mail. According to Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, a sister company to CIO's publisher, CXO Media, about 2 billion business-related e-mails were sent daily in 1999, which is approximately 10 times the number sent in 1995.
This explosive growth has tended to reshape enterprise information architecture around e-mail. According to Palo Alto, Calif.-based e-business consultancy Creative Networks, more than a third of the data references made by employees during a typical workday are to stored e-mails. "Increasingly, the corporate memory is e-mail," says Chris Gray, director of product management of OTG Software, a company in Bethesda, Md., that makes industrial-strength e-mail management tools. The medium is also shaping up into a core tool in marketing, customer service and technical support. Sometimes it seems unclear whether e-mail is an application of networking or whether networks are just an implementation of e-mail. "I suspect e-mail has driven LAN sales almost as often as the other way around," observes Ron Haradian, e-mail guru and director of technical marketing for Newark, Calif.-based ClickServices.com, a wireless communications company.
As a result, e-mail management has moved from a marginal activity for CIOs to one that is nearly the entire job. CIOs today have to think about e-mail viruses, spam, privacy, security, retention and retrieval policies, device compatibility, unified messaging and capacity management. None of these are simple problems. Spammers prove endlessly ingenious, lawyers can always figure out a new complaint, and even the best capacity-management plan will fail on that bright day when employees decide to e-mail 100MB movie trailers back and forth.
Perhaps paradoxically, as the cost and complexity of dealing with e-mail keeps rising, many companies are returning to the outsourcing model -- but for a very different set of reasons. Where once e-mail was outsourced because it was too peripheral to worry about, today the application is so complex and critical that many companies find it hard to attract and develop the requisite expertise. They are turning instead to a new sector in the information industry -- e-mail service providers such as New York City's Mail.com.
