Delegation of Tasks and Dissemination of Information in Organizations: Restructuring Internet E-Mail for Doing Things

In this paper we consider e-mail as a task management tool. We present and discuss the results of an explorative study of task management in a user’s daily electronic life. Our general goal is to restructure the domain of Internet e-mail. The purpose is to make it even more suitable for cooperative, message-based communication in both virtual and real organizations. Specifically, we aim to design a control mechanism to support the identification and delegation of tasks and dissemination of information to users in an organization employing e-mail. The users are characterized by high mail traffic and a need to manage e-mail in different organizational roles. A tentative solution and a prototype are briefly described, using a previously developed conceptual model of information management in e-mail as a starting point