Management by Email Reinterpreted with a Process-Based Approach

In this paper we propose a new email-based management model, in which the organization's business processes are seen as composed of stages, whose transition is initiated primarily by receiving (e.g., an order from a customer) or sending an email (e.g., communicating a business decision). Applying the model has a number of advantages, such as not requiring high IT investments, being fast to implement, easy to learn and simple to use by the internal users, and invisible for the external users. We give reasons for which applying it may improve productivity, especially in small and/or geographically dispersed organizations or work teams, regardless of the kind of their workflows. Still, its effective implementation requires extending the functionality of email clients with workflow, task and document management functions. Such an exemplary implementation is discussed in the paper.