E-mail at work Electronic mail bas removed the barriers of time and place between engineers collaborating on complex design projects is not included in this tally). COMPETITIVE EDGE. The advantages of elec- Tandem’s net links 11 000 employees and tronic mail are many. Besides the obvious Recently, 53 engineers at Digital Equipment Corp.- spread across Massachu- Calif., the network has 12 500 users. precedented flexibility. Managers can as- setts, Arizona, Colorado, These systems support different flavors semble engineering teams by tapping the Singapore, and Germany- of electronic mail. Private e-mail is person best people for,the project without concern collaborated on the design to person, and can comprise computer-aided for their location, then disband them as soon of a new disk drive. Most design files and digitized images as well as as the project is done. Electronic mail also had never met and Dhoned text. Wide-distribution e-mail originates eliminates the need for stressful tmsfers or .- each other rarely. Yet Dig- with one person but is sent to many and expensive temporary assignments. a ita1 estimates that this dis- , replaces interoffice memos. Electronic con- In fact, some companies have discovered persed group Ashed its project one year ferencing allows users to identify topics- that the time-honored method of assembling often technical, but in some cases with as a multifunctional team either from em- little connection to work as movie reviews ployees at one site or by means of transfers or softball scheduling. Anyone may review or regular meetings is no longer practical. a running transcript of a conference and ap- According to a study conducted last year by pend a comment. David Cedrone, DEC’s corporate voice and Engineering managers interviewed by video manager, and Edward McDonough, a IEEE Sbectrum, an admittedly unscientific professor from Northeastern University in
Tandem Computers Inc., Cupertino, ~ sample,-typically receive about 25 messages 1 Boston: “As projects become increasingly Calif., has a similar tale. In June the com- daily; engineers receive more or less, de- complex and greater numbers of uniquely
pany announced a central office switching ~ pending on the intensity of projects they are slalled people are needed on project teams, system for use with the SS7 telephone net- , working on and how many interest groups more and more time willbe needed to gather
work. The 40-some engineers on that proj- ~ they belong to. them together in a common location.”
ect were scattered among five buildings in So far, though engineering organizations ~ This flexibility may let companies oper-
California and two in Texas. The project ~ like these large corporations are at the lead- 1 ate with a smaller workforce-a specialist, manager called the lead engineers at say, may work part-time with two proj- each location only once a week and ect teams many hundreds of kilometers visited those sites only a few times a away. Also, interdisciplinary teams may year; yet the scattered designers crop UP more-a group might not need worked as a cohesive unit. a full-time cabinet designer for its proj- Electronic mail networks that reach ect, but would jump at the opportuni- virtually every employee make such ty to bring one onto the team part-time, geographcally distributed work teams instead of tossing a finalized design to commonplace at DEC, Maynard, the cabinet department. “Many in- Mass., and Tandem as well as at other dividuals are required in ‘bursts,’” engineering companies. Cedrone and McDonough concluded in “Every new employee at Tandem to the problem their study. “Full-time assignment of gets an ID card and a mail access individuals rarely matches the real re- code,” said David Foley, network ar- source demands of a project.” chitect there. “And they may have the mail ing edge of e-mail usage, others, particularly Electronic mail can also uncover hidden
access several days before the ID card.” ~ small companies, have decided that they ~ expertise in a company. Whena design team
At DEC, said Peter E. Brown, corporate ~ have little need for electronic mail. at a networked company runs into a prob- telecommunications manager, “the first Electronic mail is also in less use in some j lem that stumps all team members, it broad- thing we all do when we get to work in the fields, noted Rob Kling, professor of infor- casts a “does anybody know” request morning is check our electronic mail.” mation and computer science at the Univer- throughout the network, and suggested so- ComDanies that have come to relv on elec- sitv of California at Irvine. For example. lutions often appear in a matter of hours. tronic mail have huge international net- aerospace engineers are seldom network James Treybig, president of Tandem, has works. Pa10 Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett- users. said that “a person in Switzerland on elec- ~~~ ~~~ However, engineers and scientists are pi- tronic mail can say ‘Help’ to 10 000 people Tekla S Perry Senior Editor ~~~ ~ ~ oneers in electronic mail use, and profes- (whch a person cannot do on the telephone).
24 0018-923392 53 00 1992 IEEE IEEE SPECTRUM OCTOBER 1992 And engineers still subscribe to teerhmcal lo the problem, of which 13 are wrong. But very high correlation between use of elec- journals to track developments in their he has answers.” tronic mail and group productivity ” fields. In fact, accordmg to research by Stan A study at Tandem by researchers Sara Electronic mad also leads to increased Roxanne Hdtz, professor of sociology at Up- Kiesler, Lee Sproull, and David Constant of communications by engmeers in the same sala College, East Orange, NJ., e-rim1 users Carnegie Melion ‘IJniversity in Pittsburgh building, even in adjoining offices. The rea- tend to read more, rather than less, proba- found that during a six-week penod, (Jm- son, pomted outJan Walker, a member of the bly because associates send e-mail mes- ployees broadcast about seven questions a research staff at DEC’s Cambndge Research sages refemng to published articles. day that elicited about eight replies each. Laboratory, is that electronic mal is not as Rut does e-mail really allow distant col- The great majority had first tried and failed intrusive as a phone call. It does not inter- leagues to work as closely together as they to find solutions using other sources. Some rupt the recipient, and for the sender, takes would if they were not geographically sepa- of these replies went into open reply files leqs time since he or she need not iun rated? The engneers who use it say kt does, that could be accessed by other employees through the social amemties “Getting eight though sometimes it takes a little creativity with similar questions. phone calls would be disruptive when you to communicate clearly. At DEC recently, Another Tandem study done by Toni Fin- are in the midst of something, but receiv- engineers were trying to launch the bolt, now assistant professor of oigaruzation- ing eight e-ma11 messages IS not, and often manufacturmg in Augusta, Mane, of a new a1 psychology at the 1Jniversity of Michigan, you can answer with just a yes or a no,” dighl router (a dedicated device for direct- Ann Arbor, found that the reply files were Walker told .5pectmm. ing data communications traffic) but were accessed mow than a thousand times a A fringe benefit of communicating elec- stymied by defects, so they sent an oscillo- month. The engineers who used this data- tronically is that a record is kept of all con- scope tiace to peers in Clonmel, Ireland. base most were those farthest froin Tan- dem’s Califorma headquarters. For some companies, electronic mail has meant the ability to tap into expertise that would have been completely inaccessible without it. Report Cedrone and McDonougli in their dudy: “Pockets of expertise and specialization exist throughout the world, ’’ At Sun Microsystems, engineers are rol- 1 laboiating with a team of 33 former super- computer designers in MOSCCJW,St. Peters- burg, and Novosibirsk to develop compiler softwarc for Sparc workstations, to be mar keted in the United States, Europe, and Japan Recause the telephone network in Russia is unreliable, and most of the Rus sian designers have difficulty with spoken English, electronic mail IS for many project workers the sole means of transatlantic coin- munication it IS used to debate complex 1980 81 KP 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 teclanical issues as wcll as deal with more mundane problems. (The Cahforiiia eir- The number ojpnvate US electronac mad networks znstnlled by corporataons, nonprofit asso- gineers helped their Russian counterparts czations, and unzwrsitaes /blue] has grown much faster than their publac counterparts [red] ’ network their worksfations after the Rus- sians e-maifed a file in PostScript, a pnnter versations Meeting “notes” can be dis- The Insli engmeers responded the next day: language, that contained the floor plan of trihuted to interested parties outside the you must be using capacitors froin such and their officr huildmg.) core team, new team members can easily such a vendor, replace them and your prob- Project teams that span time zones may review past dscussions and get up to speed, lem is solved. It was. speed development by working round the managers can review the reasoning behind ENDIN6 ISOLATION. The earhest usem of clock. Rewlett-Packard has research labora- a decision, and a message received by one electronic mail were researchers at univer- tories in Bristol, England, and Tokyo, as well parson can be forwarded easily to others. sities. Since the Advanced Research as in &lo Alto, and jornt projects are becom- “We go back quite often and refer to old Projects Agency Network (Arpanet) provid- ing common “The time difference means messages for part numbers or specs, I’ said ed the first reliable electronic highway in [the overseas] engineew are going home as Glenn Rankin, a development engineer at 1969, commumcation over the net has ac- we are going to work and vice versa,” said HP “It doesn’t require writing thmgs down celerated the process of research. David Krcci, director of research services at and putbng them III a notebook somewhere.” Researchers thousands of kilometers Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Pa10 Alto. Finally, perhaps least in importance, apart meet m on-line discussion groups “.So we can leave thein a message at the end though not tnvial, e-mail is a bargain. Ac- devoted to their specialties, and communi- of our day, and they can pick up and work cording to Hewlett-Packard’s caiculat~ons, cate regularly on the net with peers whom wher~we left off, then hand it hack to us a two page electsomc mad message between they inay never have met. in our mornma.” any two HP employees worldwide averages “‘One of the facts about being an expert “Electroiuc mal gn7es us about a 30 per- US $0.22; a letter averages $0 51, and a fax in something and working at a university is cent gain in productivity, ” estimated David averages $1.86. that a typical university can’t afford to main- Ditzel, dvactor of advanced development at Studies have shown, however, that e-mat1 tain more than one or two experts in a field ‘
smaller universities. The scientists in her ~ often revised and “republished” several born. You logged in at any time and read the study reported more communication with times before they appear in tmditional jour- 1 latest gossip or hard news and sent in any
both people in their fields and those in other nals or are delivered at conferences. ~ insights you had gathered yourself.. . . The disciplines that resulted in productivity gains Sometimes the pace of net vs. journal pub- 1 ‘paper’- really a set of electrical signals by “increasing the stock of ideas and provid- lication trips over itself. A paper finally pub- propagating through the air-flashed round ing leads, references, and other infor- lished in a journal in, say, September may 1 the world like an electronic chain letter.” mation. ’ ’ reference a paper to be published in the According to Richard Petrasso, a principal “Subjectively experienced effects of the 1 same journal in November, since the elec- physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of increased communication with a larger net- tronic forms of both papers had already been , Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, electron-
work of scientists include the ability to get widely circulated and seen by both authors. ~ ic mail discussions backed up by preprints ‘instant feedback’ on ideas and to ‘kick ideas Some think e-mail mav have dramaticallv of DaDers._ and errata transmitted by fax “had around’ with others when a piece of work sped the response to the purported demon- a direct impact on our work,” leading to the is in its formative stage,” Hiltz writes. stration of cold fusion claimed by Stanley publication of several papers on the topic With e-mail, months or years no longer Pons and Martin Fleischmann in March shortly after the cold fusion experiments pass between a researcher’s completion of 1989. Information about their results was were announced. experiments and the dissemination of distributed on Bitnet, a worldwide academic Nate Lewis, a professor at the California results. Now, scientific papers are “pub- network, before it was published in a jour- Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said lished’’ on the network, commented on, and nal; comments by other researchers, from researchers in his cold fusion group ‘‘read
Meta-matrices “Uncontrollable” is the best way to describe the TCPIIP-compatible products, like routers and mod- the expensive high-capacity links. Though gigabit- growth of big networks, said Vinton Cerf, president ems. “That was the beginning of the explosive period per-second superhighways are still in the research of the recently formed Internet Society, and a dom- of growth,” Cerf told I€€€ Spectrum. stage, they will be essential for bandwidthintensive puter scientist at the Corporation for National Re. The Internet protocol suite, now widely accepted imagery. (Recently the MIME Internet standard for search Initiatives located in Fieston, Va. No one really internationally,is designed for decentralized use and sending multimediaemail was completed. In July, knows just how extensive many of these decentral- to link heterogeneoussystems. The collection of net. during a technical conference, voice and images ized computing webs of cyberspace are. The indi. works that share this protocol is known as the In- using the MIME standard were sent over the Inter- cators are, however, that the proliferation is occur- ternet. net to several countries.) ring exponentially. Once hooked on to the Internet, most users pay About 17 000 networks now plug into the Inter- A half-dozen varieties of wide-area network exist. no more to send 1000 messages to Tokyo than to net, and its users number in the millions. Accord. Besides the many commercial offerings such as send 10 to Boston. Lower-echelonusers are gener- ing to a quarterly survey done in July by Mark K. Prodigy and CompuServe vo probe further, p. 331, ally charged a one-time installation fee of several Lottor, a consultant for the network information sys- there are the exchanges for science, technology, and thousand dollars for a dedicated phone line and tele tems center of SRI International, Menlo Park, Calif., education. The Internet is the largest all-purpose communications gear Cyndi Mills, manager of NSF the Internet has 992000 host computers, up by global meta-network supported by governments, Network Services (NSFnet), Cambridge, Mass., and 100 000 since April. while FidoNet represents another class of connec- head of the Internet Engineering Task Force’s ac. Data on the NSFnet from Merit Network Inc., Ann tion, the kind formed spontaneously by individuals counting working group, said rates vary from $25 Arbor, Mich., show how the largest backbone of the without much investment. to thousands of dollars a month, according to how Internet is used. In June, 15.7 billion packets were INTERNATIONAL NET. The Internet traces its ori- much bandwidth is rented and the size of the or- transmitted on NSFnet, more than double the num. gin to Arpanet, a computer science experiment set ganization. ber of June 1991 and five times that of June 1990. up by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects FLOWIN6 TRAFFIC. The Internet is analogous to File exchanges accounted for 31 percent of the Agency in the late 1960s. In the next decade, Ar. a highway system, with dedicated communications usage; electronic mail, for 21 percent; and interac- panet‘s growth plus a confluence of terrestrial and links-copper and glass fiber cables as well as tive computing such as telnet (where a user logs satellite switching technologies and the development satellites-functioning as the concrete and asphalt. in remotely to operate, say, a supercomputer), for of local-area networks set the stage for wide-area Leased phone lines of 56 kilobits to 1.5 megabits 13 percent. interlinked computer networks. per second often serve as the on-ramps, connect- NSFnet is truly international. Over and above the An additional influence came from the US. Depart- ing to regional networks. The capacity of the T1 high- 3898 networks in the United States linked to it, as ment of Defense, which in 1978 endorsed the Trans- ways is 1.5 Mbls; that of the T3 routes is 45 Mbls. of July 1992 NSFnet had a total of 30 networks in mission Control Protocolllnternet Protocol (TCPIIP) These latter are currently being installed by a non Brazil, 3 in Estonia, 10 in Poland, 119 in Japan, 187 as a data communicationsstandard. Devised in part profit joint venture by IBM, MCI, and Merit Network in the United Kingdom, 287 in Germany, 243 in by Cerf, then at California’s Stanford University, called Advanced Network and Services Inc., located France, and 253 in Canada. TCPIlP in 1983 was made a requirement on Arpanet in Elmsford, NY Like postal and highwiy systems, Internet receives and Milnet, a Government military network, by the Breaking messages into various sizes of packets, subsidies from assorted government agencies for Defense Communications Agency. which are then sent along optimum routes, helps research, installation, maintenance, and service help. After that, companies responded by making to keep traffic flowing and to make efficient use of Consequently, the cost of a single message is “vir-
26 IEEE bPECTRLM OCTOBER 1992 the latest gossip” on the networks to an automated file server at PARC. every day. “It propagated rumors, but The server would extract chip designs it also kept close track on the facts.” from the e-mail messages, collect de- A drawback of electronic mail, There is no inertia signs into manufacturable groups, and though, is that the ability to move fast convert the data into the appropriate is not always positive. ‘ ‘hybmethere in the system anymore, format for semiconductor mask- is a rush, there is less time to contem- malung. plate your results,” said Petrasso at and there are times when E-mail is particularly important in MIT. “A scientist needs time to cogi- making crash projects successful, Con- tate about his paper. We all make mis- inertia is a good thing way told Spectrum. “It is a powerful takes, and the increased rapidity in medium for small group coordination communications is depriving the scien- round the clock,” she said. “Because tist of the time to think, and talk to col- other and universities over the Arpanet. By the VLSI design project was intense, e-mail leagues, and change things before they are the mid-l970s, it was already being viewed was suitable. ’ ’ made public. As a consequence, there will by engineers as a powerful tool. E-mail was also used at Xerox PARC in the be more mistakes committed by scientists: At the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center late 1970s and early 1980s for the develop- maybe because of e-mail the mistakes will (PARC) in the 197Os, collaborationby means ment of Interpress, a printing protocol that be discovered more quickly by others, but of electronic mail allowed then PARC has evolved into today’s PostScript language. it doesn’t make it a happier environment. ” researcher Conway and California Institute John Warnock, an Interpress designer and These days, however, said Lynn Conway, of Technology professor Carver Mead to de- now chairman and chief executive officer of associate dean of the college of engineering velop their ground-breaking methodology Adobe Systems Inc., Mountain View, Calif., at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, for structured very large-scale integmtion has recalled that Interpress designers were it is hard to imagine coordinating university (VLSI) design. At fitthey exchanged only scattered among Palo Alto and El Segundo researchers without e-mail, because their text messages between Palo Alto and in California and Pittsburgh and Philadelphia varied class, research, and travel schedules Pasadena, but soon they were shipping ac- in Pennsylvania. makes them especially hard to track down. tual instructions for IC layouts electronically In the early 1980s, Common Lisp, a com- ENGINEERING TOOL. Electronic mail entered over Xerox Corp.’s companywide mail puter language for artificial intelligence, was the engineering workplace in the late 196Os, system. designed by a group of some 60 people at when corporate engineering research or- By tapping into the Arpanet, students numerous organizations collaborating over ganizations began communicating with each across the nation could submit design files the Arpanet. The group met just twice in three years, idhas indicated that the language development would not have been possible without the Arpanet’s e- mail capability. tually impossible to figure out,” said Larry Landwe- Another probtem with e-mail is the maze of ad- DOWN SIDE. Electronic mail has its limi- ber, vice president of the Internet Society. Instiiu- dress names Some business cards display three tations, nonetheless. According to tions share costs by renting capacity, unlike on or more e-mail addresses An kAemdaddress m@tl Walker of the DEC Cambridge Re- Milnet, where users are charged according to the look like: pdam@horg; but to pass to FioNet search Laboratory, “It is very hard to number of pack& sent. from the Internet, the address might be: reach a decision about something that In the United States, Gavernment-funded back- [email protected]. Still other is complex and multifaceted.” Walker bones such as NSFnet are ostensibly used for email addresses use ! or 46 symbols and are even told Spectrum that she has participat- educational and research purposes only. There are longer. ed in a number of lengthy and deep also commercial backbones on the Internet, which In contrast, the labyrinth of protocols causes no technical discussions carried on by can sell software or seMces and offer games with big hassles for electronic mail. It is relatrvely easy means of e-mail, but has found that, in the meter running. at a sateway between &wohtotrans@ethe head- the absence of a structured, face-to- CAUlflQFIuIIR.Unlike the Internet, FioNet is er from one recognized mail application protocol face meeting, a participant rarely takes a telephone-basedrela/ network, requiring people to andher (such as the Open System lnterconnec- charge, summarizes the data present- to makecalls using exstlng puwc phone liideal- tion’s X.400 to that used on the Internet, SMPF and ed, and guides the group toward a so- ly at regular intemls, to forward email. FidoNet is RFC822). lution. “It is great for collecting infor- acknowledged to be in more than 60 countries, in- “We will ahra/s see mulipk! standards out there,” mation, but it is tough to reach closure, cluding the Uniied States said Cerf, because of the installed base, different because people just haven’t worked out Since it does not require much infrastructure, it priorii and new technology. Even proprietarypro the processes yet,” she said. is easily installed and is therefore common in de- tocols such as Appletalk and Decnet may be en Sociologist Hiltz noted a similar veloping counlriis, noted Landweber, a professor capsulated and sent across the Internet. phenomenon in her study of scien- of computer sciences and a specialist in interna- The longawaited PriMCyenhancedelectronic mail tists-that half the users felt that the- tional networking at the University d Wisconsin in is jud becoming availaMe to Internet USEAs com- oretical controversies in their fields Madison. Because the FidoNet is financed almost panies use netwoh to send proprietary idom were clarified by the use of electronic entirely by individuals, reducing modem-telephone tion, pr%v and authentic@ become essential. But communication, but none felt it helped time has been the priorii of the protocols, which US export restrictions on certain cryptography tech- resolve them. nmuse Zmodem-based transports. niques may create special islands of users. Engineers who spend too much time Since Nmmber 1991, an experimental system Cerf also acknowledged that the system is not reading e-mail lose sight of the forest that uses Internet to exchange mail and new be- friendly to neophytes but rather “is designed and for the trees, Conway has noticed. tween Europe and North America has saved Fido. used by people who are comfortable in the arcane “Your point of view becomes skewed Net operrdors thousandsof dollars a month, accord. world of sdtware.” Hmr,this culture is chang- to the present, and you lose the ability ing to Randy Bush, Pacific Systems Group, Porthnd, ing, he noted. The growing number of commmer- to manage subtle things that take time Ore. FidoNet has tens of thousands of public and cia1 users will surely not put up with difficult user to build and grow,” she said. private nodes and more than a million users, Bush interfaces and, just as important, will spend a lot “There is no inertia in the system estimated. The daily volume of compressed elec- of maney to spur the marketforeas/.to-use@ems anymore,” said Robert H. Anderson, tronic news on FdoNet is about 5 Mb. -d A. A. senior informationscientist at the Rand Corp., Santa Monica, Calif., “and there
Pen-E-mail at work 2 are times when inertia is a good thing.” For its first decades, only a relatively small so-and-so. In an electronic list of messages, For those who are new to electronic mail research community had access to electronic a message from a summer intern looks just or who use it seldom, the lack of nuance in mail. But in the past five years or so, it has as important as one from the company keyboarded comments poses hazards. Write become widespread in the biggest corpora- president. Anderson and Norman Z. Shapiro in a Rand tions, and it wiU be some more years before Eledronic mail, said Lucky at AT&T Bell report: “Perhaps the most important it reaches a more general audience. As a re- Laboratories, “has produced a new social phenomenon in electronic mail systems is sult, much electronic mail to date has been fabric for the R&D community that cuts the likelihood that the recipient will react of some value to the recipient. Nonetheless across corporations and the hierarchy of or- negatively or inappropriately in reamma- junk mail has begun to proliferate, and may ganizations, cream a new kind of accessi- terial that might well have been misinter- threaten e-mail’s usefulness. To combat bility. It is easier to send e-mail to very im- preted.” the threat, several electronic-mail systems portant people, people whom you would An informal system of “intlecting” e-mail, have introduced “filters” in various never consider writing or calling.” called “smilies” has developed, but it does versions. At Tandem, anybody can, and many do, not always register with the recipient. In an Some filters sort mail into topic folders de- send messages to president Treybig, an electronic mail debate on the risks of the fined by the user, so that less important mail open access policy the company believes is computer revolution, published in the Wall may be collected and handled at leisure. one reason for its success. Street JWnul on April 6, Mitchell Kapor, Others act as “bozo” filters, eliminating Electronic mail also eliminates cues about founder and former chief executive of Lotus messages from certain sources, giving those age, gender, race, and appearance: people Development Corp., Cambridge, Mass., from key sources high priority, or forward- are judged only by the value of their ideas, commented: “Risks, what risks? Computers ing some to other recipients for handling. so all ideas can get an equal hearing. Car- are here to benefit all personkind. :-) ’ ’ Another type filters out any message sent negie Mellon researcher Kiesler writes: But debate participants who did not no- to more than, say, 20 people, rationalizing “When communication lacks dynamic per- tice the smilie :-) got into a heated debate that messages with broad distributions ei- sonal information, people focus their atten- over his remark. It was interrupted only ther are of little account or will be heard tion on the message rather than on each when Kapor revisited the conversationthree through other means. other. ’ ’ days later and said, “The typogmphic glyph Filters, however, are not popular. They This may lead to better decision-making. :-) which I included at the end of my com- prevent people from getting the unexpect- Kiesler and Sproull, also at Carnegie Mel- ment is the on-line equivalent of an ironic ed message-the new contact, the new lon, concluded in their studies that the best or sarcastic tone of voice. It is intended to information-that is sometimes the most im- solution may not arise from face-to-face convey that the writer really means the opT portant by-product of electronic mail. group discussions if it is suggested by a low- posite of the literal meaning of what preced- Even nonjunk mail is sometimes status person; electronic meetings may find ed. . .What I was saying was that there are overwhelming-25 messages a day can be better answers. risks in computers.” reviewed and handled in 20 minutes, per- And for engineers, Lucky said, e-mail may Even when understood, smilies do not haps, but the several hundreds of messages be a better medium for communicationthan eliminate another hazard of e-mail commu- waitmg after a two-week vacation are daunt- voice. “I’m shy about talking to people on nication-the temptation to “flame.” With ing, keeping some engineers and managers the telephone that I haven’t met in person,” e-mail it is all too easy to dash off an angry from ever really taking a break; they check Lucky told Spectrum. “I would rather deal and ill-considered reply to a message-much their electronic mail daily, no matter where with a computer. It’s easier to think with my easier than when responding orally or in a they are or what they are doing. fingers, and I don’t get tongue-tied.” formal letter. A solution suggested by sociologist Hiltz Electronic mail reduces the tendency of Some electronic users are not aware or in her 1985 book Online Communities-but the more outspoken personalities to domi- fornet that “private” e-mail is not real- - nate discussions, and therefore allows ly private; a &cord ofthe messages ex- more diverse ideas to emerge. As ists on a fide server somewhere, is Kiesler and Sproull put it, research sometimes archived onto tape and Electronic mail cuts laboratories have leapers, who think stored for years, and can be retrieved quickly on their feet and love debate, by others in a company (Federal law across corporations and plodders, who like to work through prohibits outsiders from snooping into implications of ideas in detail before electronic communications, but em- and the hierarchy of sharing their analysis. With electronic ployers can tap in at will. Other legal mail, both types of scientists get their protection surmundmg e-mail are hazy organizations, creating ideas heard; without it, the leapers and are currently the subject of much dominate. debate.) new kind of accessibilit The ability to communicate across The good news is that important mail the hierarchy, broadcast to peers in var- accidentally “deleted” can be - ious places in an organization, and form retrieved. The bad news is private mail may apparently not widely implemented-is a ad hoc communities to solve problems will be misused; people have been fired because self-destruct capability: senders can tag reduce the need for middle management and of the content of supposedly private mes- messages with the last date of their useful- make corporations more efficient, said Rand sages. In Colorado City, city council mem- ness, after which they erase themselves. For Corp.’s Anderson. “Corporations can be bers discovered to their dismay that the example, Zmail, a mail system used on Sym- run with thousands of employees less than mayor was able to thwart them on certain bolic~computers, asks for an expiation date before,” he told Spectrum, “and we are al- issues because he had been regularly read- in the header of a message, and users choose ready seeing some layoffs result.” ing their “private” communications. And whether or not to have expired messages au- The effect is positive, Anderson indicat- the reappearance of e-mail memos sent and tomatically deleted. ed, because the talents of individual em- apparently deleted by White House officials RESTRUCTURING THE ORGANIZATION. By its ployees will be able to develop more fully was key evidence in the Iran Contra hear- very nature, electronic mail blasts aside typi- than if they were locked in a traditional phys- ings. [Security concerns of computer com- cal corporate hierarchies because the mes- ically co-located work group. “A lot of peo- munications were addressed in the August sages are undifferentiated-there is no fancy ple will have to find new employment, ” he issue of Spectrum, “Data Security,” letterhead or secretary to place a call and said, “but somebody always gets hurt in pp. 18-34.] ask the person called to hold for president revolutions, and this is a revolution.” +
28 IEEE SPECTRUM OCTOBER 1992