42% of Best-in-Class companies reduced lost productivity attributable to email by more than 20%

42% of Best-in-Class companies reduced helpdesk time and the cost to remediate email related infections by more than 20%

65% of Best-in-Class companies reduced the volume of spam reaching user inboxes by more than 20%

These stats are courtesy of a June 2009 Aberdeen Group research  report on safe email. The focus of the report was to highlight the strategies best-in-class companies put in place in order to create an effective email security strategy, but I think there’s a lot more here to derive if we look a little deeper.

The report is telling and supports many of the ideas put forward by enterprise 2.0 companies about the many ways in which email is failing companies. That’s not to say email doesn’t have it’s valuable place in business. It does. But it can no longer be the end all, be all for business communications.

In the report, Analyst Carol Baroudi writes: “Well-financed email threat creators persist in propagating ever more sophisticated and potentially lethal attacks through the estimated 62 trillion spam messages sent last year……Add the rising value of sensitive data in a desperate market, and we have a set of trends that all point to critical reasons organizations cannot ignore their email vulnerabilities.”

Enterprise wikis are a valuable tool to address and obviate some of the issues arising from excessive reliance on email. They help reduce a lot of the 'occupational spam' that is often the bane of email interactions at many companies. By involving trusted colleagues and external stakeholders in a secure Enterprise 2.0 environment, one can go a long way in perpetuating Wikis as the preferred means of knowledge capture and dissemination, and recover lost productivity in the process.