Is there anyone who does not use it? Is there any organization that can fathom how things were done before it was available? Is there anyone out there who believes electronic mail is a short-term form of communication destined to go the way of the dedicated word processing machine?

Indeed. Although it seems to occupy the middle ground between formal correspondence and less formal conversation, email might be the most dominant form of expression in use in organizations today. Certainly, it has driven the costs of doing business way down, the productivity of workers way up, and has shortened turnaround times by orders of magnitude.

But as an organizational issue, "e-mail is fraught with unanticipated and unaddressed issues and challenges, risks, and rewards as it increasingly dominates workplace communications," said Dees Stallings, a longtime business and technical writing consultant to government, academia and industry, and Managing Director and Chief Learning Officer of High Stakes Writing.

Ask Stallings where the potential pitfalls of e-mail begin and you get an answer as tactile as your own keyboard. "It's so easy to press the Send button," he said, distinguishing e-mail as a conveyance that often seems to posture as the Casual Friday of communications modes.

The problem is, of course, that as relaxed as we all might be about firing off our next e-missive, e-mail is increasingly targeted by the press, litigators, public interest lobbies, and even IGs and oversight interests, as the official record of how an agency or company conducted its affairs. "Every e-mail creates a record, and now we have Instant Messaging to deal with too," Stallings said.

The "Send button" can launch everything from the embarrassment of bad grammar or diction to causes for legal action on an organization (with resulting termination of individuals). But how cognizant are most organizations of the ramifications of email? Even with subpoenas now archived that unearthed the emails of Martha Stewart and the Clinton White House, to name just two, most organizations have not caught up with the need to coherently implement email best practices across their enterprises, Stallings said.

Former chief of the Army's Communicative Skills Program, Stallings first used the form of email afforded by the experimental ARPANET, the R&D forerunner of today's Internet. "Because the ARPANET was mostly used by researchers, the messaging done on it took on a formal tone that you might find in memos or correspondence," he said.

"But then came the early 1990s and the Internet, and you soon had 'flaming' and click-on smiley faces, chat rooms, and a form of communication that was often used anonymously with little or no accountability factored in." As these new, "anything goes" mores began to overtake the Internet, organizations began to see the downside of an easily accessed Send button and finally began "to understand that this isn't the wild west anymore," Stallings said. 

"We are way overdue for a forum for discussing good electronic communications practices.   There's lots of training going on for the original skills - writing, speaking, listening - but most business and government communication today goes on via  e-mail."

Today, Stallings provides expertise to corporations, associations, academia, and military and civilian government agencies in areas including safe email use, e-learning, business communications and technical writing proficiency. As part of his work, he will begin providing the Public Sector Institute with a regular column on the broadest and stickiest issues that surround electronic communications and email use.

He will focus on what users and organizations can do to "tame and humanize an area where standards of clear and effective communication are fuzzy, at best."

Some topics he plans to cover in depth include:

• Advice for reducing risks of embarrassing, incompetent, or illegal e-mail communications for government users in today's high-tech and globally-oriented environment.
• Responses to readers' questions and comments: "There's plenty to share - catastrophic and costly e-mails, humorous e-mails, e-mail problem situations with innovative solutions, just to name a few.  E-mail's rise to dominate global communication was so rapid, we assumed good practices would naturally evolve; that didn't happen.  People today are aware of the extraordinary power of e-mail for good or evil, and want to express their perspectives and questions."
•  Major emerging and continuing issues on e-mail use - trends in legislation, compliance, policies, training, for both public and private sector e-mail use. 
• Techniques and strategies for improving the safety and effectiveness of e-mail.

"I hope to make the column a forum for useful and timely feedback to users, and a place where the best emerging practices can be examined with an eye on how they can be implemented by real users in the real world," Stallings said.

Dees Stallings column will focus on safer and more efficient e-mail for government and business. Contact him with your questions at safeemail@pubsector.net.

Dr. Dees Stallings is Managing Director and Chief Learning Officer of High Stakes Writing, LLC, (www.highstakeswriting.com) where he focuses on safer and more efficient e-mail for government and business. Dr. Stallings was chief of the Army Communicative Skills Office in the Center for Army Leadership, Command and General Staff College, which manages all Army training in writing, speaking, reading, listening, memory, and reasoning.  Before that he was Director of a 400-person telecommunications training department (Switching Department) at the Army Signal Center, Fort Gordon, GA, where he also wrote the installation's Information Systems Plan.

He is also an online professor for Park University, the nation's second-largest online postsecondary educational institution.  He has been a professor or lecturer in language, literature, or philosophy at nine different institutions. He publishes extensively, and has a small book through Prentice-Hall focusing on writing skills improvement in distance education environments. His MA and PhD are in English and linguistics

For further information, you may contact him by phone at High Stakes Writing, (410) 867-6172, or via Internet dstallings@highstakeswriting.com.