The “Sharp End” Series
An independent study by the primary
research division of Quocirca Ltd.
www.quocirca.com
June 2004
Contacts:
Quocirca Ltd
Tel +44 118 948 3360
inquiries@quocirca.com
Email: Business or Pleasure?
Mission criticality meets personal interest
We all take email for granted, but rarely have time to consider how much we have come to
rely on it for both business and personal communications. This short report looks at the
importance of email and how it is used based on feedback from IT professionals working at
the sharp end.
• Email is a business critical application
More than 80% of respondents saw email as critical or extremely important for internal
communication within their organisation. A similar proportion highlighted the importance of email
for external communication with customers, suppliers and business partners.
• Email is a pre-requisite for doing business in the modern commercial world
When we looked more closely at the perceptions of email importance by company size, we saw an
important difference. Smaller companies rely on email much less for internal communications,
almost certainly because it is more likely that employees will be working in close proximity to
each other. The importance of email for external communications was consistent across all
organisation sizes, however, highlighting that email is now an important business-to-business
communication mechanism that all organisations must have in place to trade effectively.
• Email is also important for personal communications and the line between business and
personal use is often blurred
Around half of respondents indicated that there was significant personal email traffic being sent or
received via their company systems and almost four out of five (78%) acknowledged that users are
accessing their personal email accounts via company equipment. Conversely two thirds of
respondents were aware of users in their organisa