Interesting Links for 15-08-2014

[andrewducker]

• Engineers turns metal into glass
  (tags: metal glass engineering )
• Hospital replaces heart valve - and place sit outside the heart
  (tags: heart surgery )
• Should holiday email be deleted?
  (tags: email work holidays )
• The British Library's exhibition on British comics has some odd omissions
  (tags: comics history uk )
• Want EE to answer your customer

Comments

[tobyaw]

I don’t get the holiday-email-deletion thing. One could make the same argument that phone messages and letters received during a holiday should be destroyed.

Maybe some people attach any importance to emails that they receive, so this is saying that a different medium should be used for important communications. In which case why bother having work email at all?

[andrewducker]

"One could make the same argument that phone messages and letters received during a holiday should be destroyed."

I think they're talking about internal ones - not ones from the outside world. You wouldn't delete a customer's email/letter/phone call, but then in any large company those shouldn't be going to the email address of a person anyway.

Basically, external emails should go to customerservices@bigco.com (or a range thereof) and then into work queues for customer services reps to deal with or pass to internal work queues (which shouldn't be _kept_ in email, although there may be email notifications).

So we're talking about deleting internal emails - ones from your coworkers asking questions, etc. And if you've been off for two weeks chances are that those have been dealt with by someone else. Unless you're a key-person dependency, in which case your boss should be soundly reprimanded for allowing that to happen.

[tobyaw]

I don’t think there can be as distinct a separation between internal and external communication as you suggest; certainly not for small- or medium-sized organisations

[andrewducker]

Big financial company here, using internal work queues for _everything_. When a customer request comes in it's scanned, and put onto a queue for the type of processing it corresponds with (i.e. what kind of investment/policy), and then someone from the correct team will pick it up and deal with it, updating the work item until it's marked as "complete", at which point it's archived for posterity.

The idea of only having one person who could deal with a query is pretty much unheard of here - what would happen to the company if they were hit by a bus? Or left for a new job? Or went off on maternity leave?

Sure, we're not replaceable cogs, but we _always_ have multiple people in place to deal with things.

And my invites come in to my calendar no matter what - they're not really dealt with in the same way as my normal email.

I agree it's different at small/medium companies. They don't have the scale to deal with operations like that.

[alitheapipkin]

I guess it rather depends what you get internal emails about too. I checked through all the email that I'd received while off sick and then on holiday because it helped me catch up on what I'd missed in terms of project management. OTOH, I'd have been happy if my inbox auto-deleted all the crud from the wider staff mailing list about seminars and coffee mornings while I away...

[andrewducker]

I find that 95% of the project management stuff is crud too - people asking for decisions that go back and forth three times, and get resolved long before you return.

[alitheapipkin]

Being docs manager it's handy to know what they decided in my absence so I don't suddenly find there's a whole new section of documentation that's appeared without me noticing!