EMail is the most widely used tool for notifications and discussions. But it is less well appreciated that EMail is also the most widely utilized (lightweight) business process management (BPM) tool in use. Most users may not even recognize that they are using email as a business process tool.

Here are some example lightweight business processes in a company

• Collaborate on a design (Engineering)
• Collaborate on a Sales Cycle (Sales, Marketing and Legal)
• Collaborate on a Blog Post (Marketing)
• Collaborate on a Customer Issue (Support)
• Collaborate on an Issue (General)
• Collaborate on an Invoice (Accounting)
• Collaborate on a Contract (Buyer Legal and Seller Legal)
• Run a Sales and Operations Planning Process (All)

etc.

Unfortunately using EMail to collaborate on lightweight business processes can become an exercise in frustration.It is difficult to track the ‘true’ current state of the process . Instead the state of the process is represented by some combination of comments scattered over several threads and dozens or hundreds of attachment versions strewn about. For anything but the simplest processes this approach rapidly spins out of control.

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