I struggle with the usability of being notified via e-mail.  I have been to many companies where people have an excessive amount of e-mails being delivered daily.  I often ask these people how they manage to do anything else but read and answer their e-mails.  The routine answers I get back are either a smile of false importance or (for those who are brutally honest) that they simply read perhaps 5% of the e-mails coming in.

 

Doing the math, 95% of the e-mails they get, they will scan the subject line and not open.  Which means that they are not important and the user is spending a lot of time scanning his mailbox looking for important e-mails.  This makes it impossible to construct a sound logical though without being dragged to the e-mail application into scanning mode.
 

Business Notifications in Navision is a tool that allows the user to receive e-mail notifications upon some trigger in the system.  The triggers are user defined.  The normal human being, who is moderately connected spends copious time in front of the screen scanning e-mails already, allowing the ERP system to send even more automated e-mails to this person creates a certain desensitization to the e-mails coming in.  The users brain starts filtering out pretty much all e-mail coming in, categorizing it as background static.

 

This frustrates people who actually rely on communicating with others via e-mail.  The desperately put Important exclamation mark on the outbound e-mails as well as write the entire e-mail in capital letters, simulating what we would call in the real world, shouting.  Eventually, we downgrade ourselves in technology and start using the phone again, which is another background noise we thought we had fixed with the e-mails.

 

Perhaps it is time to slow down a little bit before we start a communication with another human being, and articulate what we want to say.  Perhaps, some things can be passively put out there for people to read when they have spare time (like this blog).  Other things can be put into a priority list, and brought up to the person when he/she has finished the current task at hand.  Ideas and notes can be accumulated in a collaboration environment and scheduled for discussion at a later time.

 

We live in a fast paced society and our customers demand real time solutions.  A common request during sales meetings is to have e-mails sent during some triggers in the system, so the user can immediately take care of the issue that came up.  I go on a tangent when this issue arises and start talking about discipline and processes that would handle this a lot better than an ad-hoc e-mail delivery.
 

One of my favorite examples from the real world of how not to use BN, comes from an accounting department.  In order to make sure the data entry clerks were operating correctly, the controller asked the solution center to implement BN to notify him/her of every entry that was keyed into the purchase journal.  Needless to say, the controller received countless entries daily.  In the end, he/she created a rule for all these e-mails to go into a certain folder in outlook.  She would count the e-mails that came in that day to see how many purchase lines had been entered.  I do give the controller credit for being innovative, but obviously there are a lot better ways to achieve this result!