Email between private use and organizational purpose

  • Authors:
  • Uwe V. Riss

  • Affiliations:
  • SAP Research, Karlsruhe, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 21st international conference companion on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Emails have become an eminent source of personal and organizational information. They are not only used for personal communication but also for the management of information and the coordination of activities within organizations. Email traffic also exhibits the social networks existing in organizations. However, the central problem, which we still face, is how to tap this rich source appropriately. Main problems in this respect are the personal character of emails (their privacy) and the mainly unstructured character of their contents. Since these two features are essential success factors for the use of email they cannot be simply ignored. Meanwhile there are various approaches to recover the hidden treasure and make the contained information available to information and process management. For example, semantic or mining technologies play a prominent role in this attempt. The paper gives an overview of different strategies to make organizational use of emails, also touching the role of privacy.