Anne's comment about the "ROI of Sanity" had me thinking about what would happen if we achieved the various wishlists for email management that Glen and Susan put forward. Those features would certainly make an impact, but to what degree would they achieve a measure of sanity?

At the risk of being labeled an information hippie, let's look at creating an Information Peace Coefficient (IPC) that can be applied to business cases. This analysis would give us a sensitivity reading on how likely we are to achieve results from such initiatives. Here is the proposed formula:

Do you know any teenagers? If you do, you know that email is something they think old and out of touch people use. They are much more likely to be reached by text message, twitter, MySpace, or Facebook postings. If you expect one of them to respond to an email, you are asking them to do a very un-cool deed. Some of them will reply out of respect for the elder (obviously elder, or it wouldn't have been an email) who sent it to them, but most teenagers will look at you blankly when you ask about the email you sent and say something like, "If it isn't a text message, I don't read it." Or my favorite from a well-provided-for high school senior, "Email? What's that?"
So... this is a clue that the next generation of workers probably won't use email as their primary communication medium at work. And that opens up a whole new discussion on Web2.0/Enterprise2.0 …but I won’t go there now.

But where does that leave the rest of us who are already IN the workforce and are completely inundated by email? Jesse made a point last week that discovery costs are a big component of the ROI for companies to manage email effectively. I’ve done that math, too, and agree completely. But is there another ROI as well? The ROI of workforce sanity? Productivity? Focus? I read a couple of years ago that someone had conducted a study and concluded that email was more distracting to a knowledge worker’s ability to do their job than smoking marijuana would be. WHAT? You’re kidding, right? Well, I read it in an email, so it must be true. Seriously, here is a reference to the 2005 study in a 2007 article in the Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com). I include it because I thought that within 2 (now 4) years of the study’s publication, someone would have conducted another study to contradict the results. But it seems that no one has:
“In 2005, a psychiatrist at King's College in London administered IQ tests to three groups: the first did nothing but perform the IQ test, the second was distracted by e-mail and ringing phones, and the third was stoned on marijuana. Not surprisingly, the first group did better than the other two by an average of 10 points. The e-mailers, on the other hand, did worse than the stoners by an average of 6 points.” (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-ferriss/marijuana-trumps-blackber_b_46595.html)

I want to extend Kathy's comment regarding the positioning of ECRM programs and think about the questions that lurk behind the discussion of how these programs contribute value to their organizations. As both Jesse and Anne have pointed out, it is possible to demonstrate the economic value these programs generate. But, when times get tough, will your ECRM program be viewed as a possible expense to be cut, or will it be viewed as a strategic asset? What is the value of your ECRM brand to the organization?