By Gregory A. Farley

E-mail certainly offers some interesting and indisputable bottom-line benefits for businesses. There's a tremendous reduction in long-distance telephone charges - certainly enough to cover the added cost of companywide Internet access. In many cases, delivery service and courier charges can be eliminated, too. Rather than sending a diskette overnight to a business partner or customer, the critical file can usually be attached to an e-mail document.

Time is a double-edged sword for e-mail. In the benefits column, it is certainly faster than any overnight service, and it operates at full speed around the clock. In some ways time is irrelevant to e-mail. The old questions went something like this: "If it's 11 a.m. in Chicago, then what time is it in Tokyo?" The new answer to those questions is, "It's right now." The downside is that in the past, a promise to deliver a crucial report or spreadsheet first thing in the morning meant that the actual work could proceed right up until about 15 or 20 minutes before the nearest FedEx kiosk closed. That's just not fast enough anymore: First thing in the morning is still tomorrow.

E-mail also eliminates unpleasant and time-wasting rounds of telephone tag, and it ensures that when the intended recipient goes to find your message, it will be there, waiting in the "in" box, not sitting on some administrative assistant's desk, still bound into the phone message book. And because most e-mail applications list the sender and subject of a message, the recipient can skip all the less critical communiques and get right to the meat of the matter, reading the most important messages first. Without e-mail, the recipient will have to wade through a number of garbled voice-mail messages before deciding which are most important. And consider that while fax moves just as quickly as e-mail, it delivers much less: a facsimile of a paper document. E-mail delivers a digital file that can be edited, analyzed, adjusted and incorporated into other files.


Some other points to consider
There are other benefits that are harder to quantify, whose bottom-line impacts are less visible and have more to do with how workers communicate, how they organize information in their brains and how they perceive the consequences of their actions. E-mail mandates clarity, encourages brevity and engenders wit. Any employee who masters these qualities, and utilizes them to communicate with colleagues, suppliers and customers, will be an asset to his or her employer.


What I meant to say was ...
Participants in a telephone conversation can communicate with words, intonation, the volume of their voices and even with the number and length of pauses between words and phrases. Next time a colleague is on the phone and you can eavesdrop without offense, listen carefully to the words alone and imagine you are reading them on a piece of paper. You'll marvel at how casually complex ideas can be expressed by inflection.

On the other hand, the communicator using e-mail is limited only to words, without inflection or nuance. To conduct a bit of business requires that a correspondent ascertain precisely what information is in hand and precisely what information has yet to be acquired. And while this sounds easy, it isn't. A thorough consideration of the situation - a deficit of information - mandates that the communicator determine where data is missing, where the needed data originates and where it can be acquired. To gather the information and capitalize on it requires that the communicator understand completely the upstream and downstream consequences of his or her actions. It requires that the correspondent possess a complete grasp of job functions and responsibilities for personnel throughout the enterprise.

This is a set of characteristics and abilities that ideal employees already possess and that good employees will strive to acquire.


Make it quick
Benjamin Franklin said it is the soul of wit. Most effective (and professional) communicators agree that it is a goal worthy of pursuit. Most editors recognize it as a rare and beautiful thing. And, in business, it is a too-often overlooked virtue of effective correspondence.

Information is the currency of modern commerce, and according to futurist Daniel Burrus, author of "Technotrends," it increases in value as it is shared. So information that resides too long in one place, that remains with the wrong person, is like excess inventory clogging up the works and causing enterprises to hemorrhage money. Applied (shared) properly, information is an asset. If it is hoarded or if it resides with a worker who doesn't know what to do with it, it is a liability.

Those who understand the value of information and can communicate it quickly, succinctly and carefully, will thrive in the era of digital communication.


Just like the good ol' days
Many scholars and writers have long bemoaned the fact that the modern world moves too quickly for letter writing. It's interesting that e-mail, the communications tool that will take us into the new millennium, closely resembles that lost art.

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