Towards Email-based Workflow Automation

Abstract

Modern day organisations and individuals use emails as a communication media and there exist workflows correlated to the email communication such as responding, forwarding and more complex workflows such as content analysis and attachment handling. These workflows are highly user-dependent due to various requirements such as uniqueness of users’ fields of occupation. There exist commercial tools, which are explicitly designed to fulfil the purpose of email based workflow automation and management; however, these tools are associated with email marketing campaign management thus, providing a set of marketing-centric features. If we can understand the diverse requirements of the users, it may help in providing a better solution towards effective email based workflow automation. Having analysed aforementioned limitations of prevailing tools, we conducted a survey towards understanding the requirements of the users well, towards suggesting an email-based workflow automation system. We expect to utilize this knowledge to develop a more customizable solution to satisfy the diverse user requirements via enhanced decision-making abilities.