An insight on Email for corporate needs (4)

Keep record of important information

During our course of work, there are a lot of useful information that we will archive. It may be for future reference or as a proof in black and white.

However, is email the best tool to exchange and keep knowledge? Let us take a look. What are the advantages?

• Convenient - Email has been our way of life and it is really convenient to reply or forward email to another one.


• Control - Email allows us to determine the circulation list.


• Tracking - It is possible to track whether someone has read your email with Outlook


• Getting attention - Usually people keep their inbox open at all times, therefore replies are mostly quite promptly.

What are the disadvantages?

• High changes of losing the knowledge

I have encountered several incidents that large collection of useful emails are lost when computers are infected with viruses or spoilt. This is in spite of the effort to prevent virus infections and repeated calls to backup the data.

Next, these valuable information are lost when someone leaves the company. Nobody will transfer all the useful emails from their PCs to their colleagues.

• Tedious in transferring the knowledge

Plus it is a hassle to search for information when someone else requests for it. Would it be good if they can search the information by themselves?

• Time consuming and disruptive

And a lot of time is wasted reading several emails from the same thread when actually the last email has all the useful information. Gmail has a really good solution on this

Besides that, it can be quite disruptive with emails coming in that are just "For your information only". They can be batched together to read at scheduled intervals.

• Difficulty in maintaining the accuracy of the knowledge

There are also a few occurrences where the information being circulated are not fully accurate. It may be caused by the lack of the knowledge by the author and missing out the subject experts in the circulation list to correct the inaccuracies. This could happen despite corrections have been made as an older version of the email thread are being circulated around.

• Tracing the soure of the knowledge

Sometimes for a long email thread, people will delete the non-important portion of the conversation. Subsequently, it will be difficult to track the source and original rationale of the conversation.

This post is a continuation of the previous post.
You can read the previous posts:

1. An insight on Email for corporate needs
2. Keeping track of assigned tasks
3. Getting notified for meeting requests