Ramon Padilla analyses a great post by Ross Mayfield in his article "Are your business processes and e-mail the same thing?":

I was reading the July issue of CIO magazine when I came across a quote from Ross Mayfield, the president and cofounder of Socialtext, which produces enterprise wikis. The quote from him reads, “(Employees) spend most of their time handling exceptions to business processes. That’s what they are doing in their inbox for four hours a day. E-mail has become the great exception handler.”

He lists five possible reasons for why email has become the alternative for fixing a broken business process:

1. Making it up as we go along. As I said above, e-mail becomes particularly handy when you are making your business processes up as you go along, and you end up managing your workflow and exceptions through e-mail.
2. Not enforcing business processes. The organization has well defined processes but doesn’t enforce them; therefore, people choose to do what they are comfortable with — which is send an e-mail. No matter that what they should have been doing is filling out a form (electronically) and having it routed automatically within a system to be handled appropriately.
3. Business processes that are not automated or automated with software that is outdated or doesn’t fulfill the user’s needs. Lacking automation, people will turn to what they have available in order to get their work done. If a business process has no automation, e-mail becomes a de facto substitute. Imagine a permitting operation that has no automation. A person comes in the door, requests a permit, fills out a form, provides necessary documentation, and then waits for approval. In lieu of a dedicated permitting system, creative staff come up with the following: Person comes in the door, fills out the form and provides necessary documentation. Staff scans the forms and documents into images and attaches them to an email to the next person in the process, who then handles and moves the process on. I could go on, but you can quickly see that while the above solution “works” to a degree, the e-mail system suddenly has turned into a document management system, a database, and a file management system.
4. Lack of communications within an application or integration with other communication mechanisms. I have always been a big believer that if you create an application to suit a purpose such as a permitting system, that you try to keep the users inside the application to the greatest extent possible. Ideally, that means that all messages and communications regarding the business process originate, transmit, and store within the application. Thus in my example, all information regarding permits is found in one place — the permitting system.
5. Lack of communication alternative besides e-mail. Some processes aren’t amenable to an application because they are more free form, yet need some kind of structure. This is where wikis, intranets, mashups, instant messaging, and other Web 2.0 applications become necessary. Without them, e-mail becomes the repository for any and all information.

Read the full post here: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=576