If you are a corporate knight, you get 50 emails a day. Some are ‘spam’, some are reminders, some are stupid, some are complex.
The complex ones need an answer, you know it is complicated. You need to dig, analyse, compare, trace other emails etc. Often you know that a complete answer is impossible. Familiar?
How much complexity can we handle? I got a very valid precise email the other day. Someone asked why we do not have a certain issue of a certain magazine loaded into our internal database. He needs it and asks a burning question.
My job is to load these magazines. We do not have a system in place that knows exactly what we load. We just load what comes in from the publisher. I have no means to check what we got delivered to load in January. We never bothered, we have no system in place to check. That s bad. It s also beyond my control. What do I tell this guy? What do I tell my boss about how I can not know what we loaded nine months ago? What do I try to get this under control so I can answer these valid questions next year with the few people I have to analyze? So I feel frustrated, knowing I will never have all the people to check in depth to answer well and remedy the faults.
Just one example