I haven't posted about much unrelated directly to the coverage of this blog in the last few months. Although you might see that as a good thing, I feel like musing on a topic that is in no way directly related to NGAs: email.
I have long thought that email was badly implemented in businesses, mostly because users were not guided into how it should be used optimally. The consequence is email glut, which leads to information noise and, ultimately, miscommunication. There are other email related issues in organisations, but that one is most likely the biggest.
I was reminded of this today by a short post on Gareth Spence's Online Scribbles and - just a few minutes later - by a retweet of an article written in August by Techcrunch's MC Siegler entitled Inbox 10000: Some thoughts after a month away from email. Over lunch my mind started churning again.
The backdrop to Gareth's point of view is the recent announcement by ATOS' CEO Thierry Breton of a zero email policy for the company within the year. It's not the first such announcement, but it maybe is the first for such a large organisation (80 000 employees worldwide). As Gareth points out, email is already partly substituted by other tools (he mentions Salesforce Chatter and Rypple, I've used or seriously investigated neither), and Gareth bets that these tools will continue to grow.
I have no reason to doubt that, but I have reservations as well. The results of Siegler's experiment, when he stopped using email for a month are interesting. Although Siegler makes light of the fact in his article, he couldn't actually ban email completely. He didn't use it much, but he did use it. He estimates though that he received over 10k emails in that month, and just not reading those and not responding to them was hugely liberating. I can totally see that.
Still, I'm not sure banning the tool is the right way to go. Here are a few reasons why:
- We're clearly not using the tool properly, and have little to know guidance on how to use it well, especially in a work environment. Very few companies actually tell you when you should or shouldn't email, when you should CC or not, etc. All of that contributes hugely to the noise.
- As sophisticated as our inbox tools are, they are still unbelievably klunky. Gmail is probably the best tool around, but if you want to be a gmail power user and actually set it up to optimise your emailing flow, you have to learn the intricacies of a complex tool and spend a heck of a lot of time setting it up. Something that regular users will never do. One of the comments to Siegler's story had a link to http://zeromail.com/ and that looked interesting and promising. Considering I know nothing about them, I'm reluctant to try it out but intrigued at the same time.
- Finally, and most importantly, the email and the internet share a very important feature: they are universal. Emails can be written and read no matter which client(s) you use, who your ISP(s) is/are, which device(s) you're writing from or reading on. How do you replace a universal communication system without the replacement being just as open or universal? To take Gareth's examples, chatter and rypple are dependent on a contract with a software company. Social networking relies on accounts being open with facebook, twitter or others. IM also requires specific (ie non-interoprable) clients and accounts. As a consequence none of them will replace email. None of them can. They will divert some of its traffic for sure, they already are.
So email is here to stay. I'm curious to see what Breton comes up with to replace email. That's the part ATOS has been stangely silent about. My suspiscion is that it won't eliminate email completely (if only for external communications) and will replicate a lot of its failings as well. But maybe I'm too pessimistic.
My own view is this: if email has to stay, even if it's only for 10s of messages a month, that's one more tool. Why not rethink email instead of trying to add more tools and complexities to the communication processes ?
If that's what www.zeromail.com does and they turn out to be reputable, I'd like to try that first...
