Why e-mail is still the most important business IT tool

Our last article asked why e-mail, a 40-year-old technology, won't die. Now we look at what else e-mail can do apart from messaging that makes it so indispensible in the 21st-century workplace.

After all, the novelty of e-mail enabling instantaneous communication with contacts near and far should have worn off by now - and since the inbox is prone to everyday irritations (spam, information overload) there must be other reasons why it's still so ubiquitous as a business tool?

The answer, we think, is all the other stuff e-mail does that adds up to much more than written communication. E-mail's not perfect, by any means, but it fulfils such a number of functions that we couldn't easily replace. The funny thing is that many of these were never intended…

A task manager - It's obvious that in your daily workflow, e-mails become to-do lists. Now, many e-mail clients include features for managing your daily tasks. Nevertheless, for a lot of workers, the inbox simply is their to-do list. (It's no wonder some feel overwhelmed…)

A file storage system - Who wants to spend time figuring out which folder on the company server is the right place to store that document that just winged its way over? And who can dedicate their grey matter to remembering which location they eventually chose? Legions of e-mail users have settled for keeping those attachments with the original e-mail rather than deciding upon somewhere else to save them, making e-mail a kind of file storage system.

A meeting organiser - Although e-mail was never supposed to be a calendar, this was a logical development when co-workers are always requesting meetings - and of course, typically you're in a meeting when they want to know, so instead of asking you at your desk, the request comes via e-mail.

First-class support for business e-mail…of course 

We've first-hand experience of why e-mail is still so vital to businesses' way of working: a significant proportion of calls for our IT support in Bristol come from companies needing their e-mail troubleshooting (or, as it's sometimes conveyed, "fixed and back online ASAP"). Supporting this 'old' technology that keeps itself relevant in a fast-moving IT world is still a vital part of what we do, and looking at all the extra functions people use e-mail for, we can't see that changing for a while yet!