Everybody has heard of the 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto principle, which states that in many cases, business and otherwise, 80% of the effects come only from 20% of causes. Email is no exception - however, the ratio is far more extreme.

Our analysis of large messaging environments over many years has revealed that in most companies 80% of the corporate messaging resources are being consumed by only about 1% of all employees.

This is a significant finding especially in times where tight IT budgets are strained by rapidly growing message volumes and resulting skyrocketing bandwidth & storage costs.

What this really means is that there is a huge opportunity to dramatically reduce operating costs by going after the cause of this excessive email traffic. Don’t worry, I am not proposing to fire the 1% of offending employees.

There are ways to manage email more efficiently without adversely affecting users or business operation.

Permessa just published a whitepaper (I am a co-author), titled “6 Best Practices That Reduce Email Overload and Costs”. The paper highlights areas for managing excessive email traffic, such as unnecessary reply-to-all, attachment ping-pong and the overuse of mailing lists. Some of these have been previously discussed on this blog. For each topic area the whitepaper makes best practice recommendations on how to implement email policy changes that can prevent the negative effects and help save money.

Technorati Tags: email costs, information overload, best practices to reduce email overload, permessa

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