Sunday, December 04, 2011
Email in the enterprise: entering its twilight at 40?
GIGAOM: Earlier this year, European IT services giant Atos Origin declared its intentions to completely phase email out of their internal operations within the next three years. This perhaps the most compelling case to date that suggests the declining necessity of email in the enterprise. While it’s certainly premature to declare email — which turned 40 years old in 2011 — “dead” as a technology, it’s fair to acknowledge that a new generation of communication tools is gaining traction as a more effective means of communication for the enterprise.
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10 comments:
I never really thought email could be entirely eliminated, but it makes sense. If everything was run off of instant messaging and networking, the only thing i would use my email for would be to check to see if i have any notifications for my networks. I think theater could soon eliminate email with online call boards that have any information you could possibly need, like wee have now. Instant messaging could easily replace email and it's nice because it is instant with less lag time.
E-mail is one of the tools that I use most often, however I can see why it is becoming less desirable compared to its more advanced successors. I'm not sure if this means e-mail will be dead or if maybe it's just what we know e-mail to be has changed. It seems like it is already in the process of being faced out. With the speed of these technological advancements, I'd be willing to bet that e-mail will be viewed in an entirely different way by the time I graduate. I do not doubt that these "e-mail replacements" will be great improvements.
I find the idea that email is a dieing form of communication to be an almost impossible idea to get behind. I get that social media has reached a new high of some kind that people seem to think is a symbol of great things to come, but I still think that people would rather communicate professionally through something a little bit more private and stable. The article goes into some detail on how email has lost it's social aspect, but I think that txting has been more responsible for that rather then social media sites.
Like Devrie, I am a bit surprised that email is potentially coming to an end already. I can definitely see the advantage of a combined social media/IM/email-like client, but am worried that this will prompt an increase in the expectation that people are always instantly reachable. Also, while some automation is great, too much may become impersonal and robot-like. No matter how big your organization, you should always treat your employees like individuals as much as possible. Some interesting possibilities for this type of software include built in video chat, screen sharing, or doodle poll-like application. I do agree that it would be nice to consolidate the methods of contact a bit.
I would say that there is a much larger amount of communication happening over non-email means than there once was, and I think that is a great thing. I also think that emerging technologies may end up replacing email as better systems come out. But I don't know if our industry is really there yet. The advantage that emails have is that they can be sent to a large group of people for informational purposes without needing a response. Could you imagine IM for an all school email? Sure, there are social network applications that may be of use, but I think it tough to get them adopted in the workplace as a work tool. You could make a Facebook event for the production meeting, but how many people will check their Facebook before the meeting. Most probably will, but not everyone. I don't check my Facebook often enough to use it. And I don't think other social networks would be any more effective. Also, Google tried to improve Email when they came out with Google Wave, but that fell flat on its face. I think there will come a time when email will be phased out, but I don't think we are there yet.
I find the idea of an end of email to be interesting, but I don't think the replacement is social networking and IM as the article suggests. For instant communication, I think SMS is really the new lowest common denominator (Tom excepted.) I also still see phones used extensively in corporate settings - there just isn't a substitute for a real life conversation complete with vocal inflection.
For less immediate conversations, I think wikis are really the way of the future. They allow discussions to happen, associated with a particular thing. In our case maybe we have a wiki document that details the strike schedule and plan for a show. Discussions relating to strike would then happen in the commentary of that document. When a decision is made, or an option proposed, it is then inherently part of the record. This mode of communication would help keep discussions topical and organized, while also easing the transition from discussion into formal documents.
I have some issues with the proposed changes that Atos is suggesting. For one thing, if you stop using e-mail in favor of social networking platforms, you're still going to be bogged down with information, just in a different context. Also, email and instant messaging do not serve the same purpose. People feel obligated to respond to IMs, well, instantly, whereas it is acceptable to put off answering an email for up to several days.
Also, I really do not like the idea of mixing my business forms of communication with my social forms of communication. Right now, for the most part, email for me is about work and Facebook is about socializing. Blending those two things together just blurs the boundaries between work life and social life.
However, the newer technologies described in the article do seem like viable alternatives to email that allow people to preserve the boundary between work and social life.
I think this article is jumping the gun a bit- email does not seem to be dying out to me at all, nor does it look like it will anytime soon. I happen to love emailing, so of course I'm biased, but despite the fact that there are newer forms of communicating than email (I can't believe it's 40 years old!), email is still the unifying communication source in nearly every workplace. I prefer having business-related communication via email so that it can be used for conversation archival purposes, and the fact that people are now communicating across so many different platforms makes that harder and harder to do.
This article makes important points, but for what we're looking is really the evolution of email rather than its replacement.
Calvin mentioned Google Wave; this was a brilliant platform: it made emails more conversation-like and had the potential for threads to update seamlessly, but could also carry attachments and be left for later very much like email. It had better tools for controlling who was in on a thread. It fell on its face because nobody used it; they didn't make it backwards compatible with email, but rather required its own account. Anything that requires that much upfront investment won't work either.
Gmail's recent interface changes have moved in this direction, though, and tricks like having canned responses for certain types of email will help us along.
Email is definitely becoming outdated, that is true. Which is hard to believe, as it is a relatively new technology. I remember when email was the most desirable mode of communication. It was even the cool way to communicate and talk to your friends in middle school. I remember wishing I had an email, and when I finally got a gmail account, I would send emails to my friends, excited over all the little animated emojis and themes you could customize your dashboard with. I can see now that email is “slow” compared to other forms of online or technology based communication. Instant messaging is much quicker, because even though it is basically the same thing, it is much more like talking to someone in person than email is; email is definitely more like mailing someone a letter. It is more formal in format, and there is no obligation to respond quickly like there is with messaging. We’ll see what other ways to communicate pop up in the next decade or so.
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