As far as e-mail not getting the attention needed, I think what you’ve said is supporting the point I’m trying to make — from an Enterprise view point, the Enterprise is not getting the “assurance” that you’ve read the e-mail, or responded to it; even if in fact you have, and your file and read later mechanism may not be at the takeup rate the Enterprise desires.

We conducted some research around 18 months ago with an e-mail from the CEO on a highly relevant topic — I don’t have the exact figures here, but it was something like within a week only 50% of staff had even opened it, and of those that opened it, only around 50% of those ever went on to open the PDF it contained.

By Business Unit this was even worse — business units that are regularly at clients in the field had predictably much poorer response rates.

Ultimately we need to do something, whatever we do, we have to make sure that it is actually an improvement on the current situation and doesn’t just further muddy the waters.

“E-mail should be for inter-personal communication ONLY”
>I disagree - the biggest innovations in technology have come from how people used it for purposes not originally intended. Just think how Java was created for interactive television, or even how the web become something Tim Berner’s Lee never imagined as it exploded into a multi-media platform. It’s risky to specify how some one “should” use technology; might be better to specifiy how they “shouldn’t” use it. Let e-mail be the default - because it already is

“e-mail bulletins etc. are NOT getting the attention that they supposedly deserve”
> I read every e-mail I receive. Some I skim, but I still physically review each one - it’s just I have a delay in maybe reading non-critical ones. I need to take an action with e-mail - if I leave it, I am forced to take an action eventually because of space quotas. The action I take is delete, archive, or put in a folder. To take that action, I need to review. I don’t know if I would do the same with RSS; less effort is involved to skip over something.

The key benefit of RSS over e-mail is two things:
- segmentation: I can ‘filter’ my alerts by type. A weekly firm-wide alert is not as critical as a business unit alert. By filtering my alerts, I can make a judgement on consumption based on my limited attention - the non-critical can be read when I am bored for example.
- memory: search on Lotus e-mail still doesn’t find what I need, despite having an interface that looks like it can. Either way, I don’t want to have to store e-mails because it just eats space and is lost in a blackhole - however, I also don’t want to have to decide what is worth deleting and what is worth archiving. In Google Reader, there is a permanent memory of previous items - if I am looking for something, I can ‘filter’ my search by exploring a certain feed. And even better, it’s not stored on my local client - so it’s always accessible.