GMAT Essays (AWA)

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Recent technological improvements in electronic mail (E-mail) will resolve existing corporate communication problems. Vast quantities of information about products, services, and market transactions as well as most basic business communications, can be electronically exchanged, quickly and at a relatively low cost.

The passage makes an ambitious claim that email would solve all the existing corporate communication problems. But it fails to give enough evidence to support the claim. There are several assumptions in the argument, which we would look at in the following paragraphs.

First, the author assumes that all the existing corporate communication problems are related to medium of communication. Communication gaps exist in corporate as much due to interpersonal communication issues, as due to inconvenient mediums of communication. If the author had qualified his/her statement, with that e-mail would solve the existing problems with respect to mediums of communication, the argument would have been more convincing.

Moreover, the author takes it for granted that every corporate has good internet and intranet infrastructure. But this might not be the case with certain conventional industries such as mining, ceramics, etc. Though the sales and distribution offices of such companies might have a decent internet infrastructure, not all parts of the organization would generally be connected by the internet. Corporate communication includes communication made to every part of the organization, and hence the author needs to provide some insights as to how these unconnected parts of the organization would be communicated with, using e-mail.

Finally, the argument claims that using electronic mail for corporate communication would come at a relatively low cost when compared to the conventional modes of communication. Though the author rightly points out that there is not much cost involved in using e-mail, he/she fails to note that there could be training costs involved. The cost of migrating to e-mail for all corporate communications would not only include the infrastructure costs, but also include the training costs, and the costs associated with the productivity lost during the training period. If the author could provide evidence that training costs would be lowered by purchasing some easy to use software at a reasonable cost, or that most corporate employees in the country are already e-mail savvy, the argument would be stronger. [/url]