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I would go a bit further in your assertion that "[email] is collaboration technology of choice for lots of knowledge workers..". Let's be honest with ourselves, email is the collaboration technology of choice for MOST knowledge workers...and not just the older ones.
We are for instance trying to create a better user experience around (currently email based) processes that follow a designated (or free) workflow. Thanks for checking us out at http://flowr.cloudapp.net !
Email is really a glue technology and the best way for aspiring E2.0 toolsets to catch on is to embrace it rather than attempting to replace it. Your DISQUS comment stream here is a great example: Leave one comment on the web, receive replies (and respond to them) via email.
I tried to distill all of my blog posts about our love-hate relationship with email into my latest presentation, specifically starting on slide # 11. I'd love it if you and your readers could give me some critique.
Email is great for generating alerts to notify us of exceptions or incoming messages. My only quibble is that an email alert works better if it contains a link to the web application that hosts the exception information or the discussion (like say a Twitter DM notification email) instead of putting the information into the email and nowhere else.
Email as an alert system is great, email as a standalone internal communications network causes headaches.
But I do think things are shifting. And all the new (social) tools are slowly teaching us we should and can think which platform is best to share our info. For me this means - and I think this is the point that Luis Suarez is making over and over again - to use email for what it's good at and do the rest elsewhere. So, let's learn to love email for what it's good at, indeed!
However, e-mail is being misused, and this is increasingly leading to "e-mail overload". Social media like IM, Twitter, Blogs and Wikis are different tools that should be used instead of e-mail for certain use-cases, and thereby reduce the "abuse" of e-mail.
My 2 cents:
- http://www.ppcsoft.com/blog/social-media.asp
There are any number of the latter. I tend to be most irked when knowledge or important messages simply disappear into archives, where they can't be found by authers, linked to or otherwise referenced, at least not in the standard enterprise suites in most organizations. As @driessen points out, there's integration coming through the efforts of many collaborative software makers between email, knowledge management and social messaging platforms -- but often it can be spectacularly "fatty," which is to say rife with bacn. Notification spam is a miserable outcome.
As ESSPs mature, perhaps that will get better. I know email is still going to stick around but there are so many good business reasons to get the conversations out of there and into persistent storage...but you made that point quite effectively already.
Does email need to go? I don't see it happening for many years, at least until the integration issues are massaged away and the generations that grew up in the inbox get acclimated to persistent social messaging instead. Given that, maybe it's better to declare a truce and focus on integrating the original killer app into the new enterprise landscape.
I was an entry level knowledge worker at a large multinational bank. I had specific duties related to analysis, but in a general sense I was the person that made sure everything was implemented as we contemplated in credit meetings. Over time I collected a large number of solutions, work-arounds and explanations, which I kept filed in my email box to refer to periodically as needed. After a year and a half I realized the IT department automatically purged all messages over six months old. After losing many of the most useful tips from my first few months I searched for ways to avoid losing this knowledge (aside from printing everything -- which, sadly, many did) and keeping it searchable, but found none. Automated policies kept us from storing .msg and .pst files on the network (both formats are used by Outlook to store messages) and no wiki or collaboration options existed.
It saddened me because I knew that the questions I asked in the beginning are the questions that everyone asks. And the fact that everyone asks the same questions in the beginning contributes to the anti-junior-employee mentality that many mid-level to senior employees exhibited. Further, so much productivity is lost all around when the same questions have to be asked again or when tasks are done incorrectly. It would have been an easy situation to improve.
I finally conceded to the norm and prepared a static 50 page word document with much of what I learned and shared it with a few peers. It eventually made its way to our managers who promoted it to a committee they had. It remained in committee for about 11 months before then being distributed (in its original Word document form), with what was by then outdated information. I left the bank soon after, but the last I heard was that a committee was discussing if it should be linked to from an intranet page of internal resources.
There's a larger discussion around this topic focused on evolving communication/collaboration patterns-- similar to your example with voicemail. But srsly, we need more folks in authority (cough, cough) to explain to the non-converted the who/when/why/where and how these changes should be adopted for the benefit of everyone involved. And perhaps accelerate that rate of change. I realize that's what you're attempting to do here, but (ouch) please don't perpetuate the resistance to change. Or, I will ask Mr. Trump to start following you on Twitter. :-)
So far it's not flying off the shelf.
What collaboration tool do you want to have that will make it easier to capture and reuse knowledge? A bigger mailbox?
Email must die for progress to take over. All that email did was replace voicemails with unlimited time, written voicemails. For me to collaborate with you via email, or to solicit your opinion as we are doing in this post, I'd have to know who you are and where to find you. And then hope it would have reached you, that you would have read it, that you would think and answer was appropriate, that you had the time... you get the idea. Is not only the place where knowledge goes to die, it is the place where productivity goes to die.
Loose the email, save the world (man, I am on a roll with cliches today)
What collaboration tool do you want to have that will make it easier to capture and reuse knowledge? A bigger mailbox?
Email must die for progress to take over. All that email did was replace voicemails with unlimited time, written voicemails. For me to collaborate with you via email, or to solicit your opinion as we are doing in this post, I'd have to know who you are and where to find you. And then hope it would have reached you, that you would have read it, that you would think and answer was appropriate, that you had the time... you get the idea. Is not only the place where knowledge goes to die, it is the place where productivity goes to die.
Loose the email, save the world (man, I am on a roll with cliches today)
My conclusion in something we already knew - new technologies/approaches normally shine first in new application domains and only after they have proven themselves do they start to take over some of the roles, and there are some aspects of e-mail that would fit into an overall integrated tool set (e.g. push of non-time sensitive messages and private, point to point conversations that are not real time).
In other areas, if there is an alternative that is as functional, and has had the time to mature, and delivers a better experience, then people will slowly gravitate to it (and, as Amara's Law states, it will happen more slowly than we expect, but will have a bigger long term impact).
Right now, many of those alternatives have not matured enough to tempt most people away from e-mail, but do have differentiators - in terms of open sharing and immediacy and the simple fact that, as they are being applied in a limited domain by a limited set of people they are not overloaded. They have challenges to address before they can reach the level of ubiquity of e-mail though - like the number of "places" you typically have to go to keep up to date.
The fact that it provides "one inbox" where you can organsie my activities is still, to me, the greatest attraction of e-mail - and the biggest obstacle to adoption of the alternatives (which must, immediately, add a second place to look - and often more than one more). Feedreaders are a good attempt to limit you to a single second place, but don't seem universal - not coping well with wikis, twitter, etc.
I'll be really interested to hear of your experiences with Google Wave (I'd be communicating with you, but no one has favoured me with an invite yet). Specifically I would love to know what its "new value proposition" that other tools can't offer - because it needs that to get it kick started before it can replace established tools.
Every succesful social platform I am aware of has a direct messaging service, which is the essential function of e-mail. There is always a need for one-to-one private messaging, in private life and especially in the more politically charged business life.
Yes, it would be better to replace attachements with links. hold chats in a chat client, use a wiki or similar collaboration platform instead of chain-e-mails,use a blog or microblogging tool for broadcasting instead of CC-overkills, etc. However, the reason why e-mail is so powerful I believe is that it is the only one-stop solution where you can seamlessly fulfill all of these tasks.
Therefore, I believe ESSPs should not aim to replace e-mail, but rather need to integrate it and aim to become the one-stop solution that e-mail clients currently represent. As has been said below, I believe that MS is on a very good way with its integration of Sharepoint, Office and Outlook!
In the software world, it's norm for companies to release products that're "backwards compatible". You get a new version of Windows, you suppose your existing software to work on it.
If you take a broader view, it's quite logical for new software to support not only existing programming protocols, but existing "human-computer" protocols as well. Many business folks live in Outlook. Email is the backbone of business communications. It's the fact of life. Fighting with it by trying to replace it overnight is pointless not only because it's impossible, but also because it ignores _the opportunity_.
Let me give a couple of examples, one from my own practice and another from IDEO talk:
1) IDEO initially had adoption problems with their internal social platform. They took many steps to fix those problems, and one of the important ones that helped was leveraging internal email newsletter to boost awareness and usage of the social platform.
2) I had long ago seen disconnect between email and project management software http://www.wrike.com/projectmanagement/03/25/20...
We came with a creative way to solve that disconnect and it helped us grow fast. Not only that, but integration with email immediately gave our web app both mobile, offline and API access as a by-side effect. It also gave us access to the information that users otherwise would be lazy to enter into the system.
Now, this is not only theoretical musings and self-praise. Here's a practical example. I'm a big believer in ideas behind Google Wave. The problem I see today is that email integration should have been their _first_ priority. I know they will essentially get to that part, but it's so sad to see that they aren't anywhere near there yet.
Again, thanks for the great post. No disagreement here, just wanted to add my 2 cents.
Email is great for knowledge transport. But as soon as that knowledge needs to be persisted and/or shared, email fails horribly.
And therein lies the E2.0 frontal assault. People need to wake up and realize that email is good for something, but a very specific something.
I agree with Daniel P above that email needs to be embraced as part of e2.0. In fact, taking it a step further, those that figure out how to effectively embrace email will enable e2.0 to flourish.
I see two important uses for email - (1) It can be a UI into e2.0 (for some it will be THE UI), and again agree with Daniel that embedded links and media will be critical; being the UI means support for post and reply functionality via email. and (2) it should be an effective notification vehicle (which it is in any viable e2.0 technology today already).
BTW - took you up on connecting on Google Wave ... looking forward to Wave's promise.
as the senior guy on the project, I saw the inefficiencies, stress, major chances for error, creative suboptimization, laziness and plain stupidity of jamming this project through via email. but we had a deadline. we were moving fast. "it would all be over soon," we told ourselves. and we kept pushing – the madness, that is!
we get it, so on monday we're meeting to analyze how the hell we got into that mess and to hopefully re-commit to using all of our 2.0 smarts in the future ... which to me means taking a step back and reviewing the human components of our process: project leadership, personal accountabilities, our overall flow itself.
I'm all about inspiring sr. mngmnt about 2.0 through above-the-line, positive benefits. but maybe I should document the chaos we went through to help them see the tremendous waste and team demoralization of our email ordeal. that they might get. it sure lit a new fire under my butt to get our 2.0 act together!
I am living the truce with email, but I do think that email will act like a ball and chain on moving toward what could be, and what I think we agree will eventually be.
I think that the mindset for email should be as one to be used as a private communications path, with suggested replacement when possible with private chat and private messaging within chat for asynchronous discussion.
I think one thing we could do to move willing organizations toward limiting email and moving in the direction of other tools would be to disable attachments within email. Replacing them with links to documents in a document management system that is optimized for the media being linked too, (be it images, documents, video etc...). There are some added side benefits to this decision, reduction of the number of the same documents and the associated confusion over updates versions, and changes.
A follow on move may be to declare that email will begin to be indexed and made searchable/discoverable unless it is flagged as personal and private. Encouraging employees to use private chat and chat messages for most of the personal exchanges that take place. This would enable us to start to use the email text strings (now without actual documents embedded). Maybe then email might not be where knowledge goes to die as you so appropriately put it. These emails (now text files) can indexed along with chat room logs (non private) and other text tools as well.
The other uses of email would eventually need to be replaced with arguably better tools as well. Take for example the task list function, or the integrated calendar, meeting makers and the rest of the functionality we have come to love. Until we can point to a better solution in those areas as well, this is going to continue to be an uphill battle.
Then there are the customers and clients, we can change our internal methods and processes, but what about how we interact with our customers?
E-mail and ESSPs both have their own usefulness. I feel, E-mail is for communication while ESSPs are for collaboration.
E-mail works best when there is a simple need of communicating with someone or send message to a large number of people at once (like Office memos, Announcements etc.,). It is very hard to miss an e-mail and hence the message it carries. It can also be a very effective tool to get answers/information from someone you already know. It still remains one of the most successful Internet applications. E-mail is of utility value.
Whereas, ESSPs, by their very design, lend themselves more natrurally to human interactions than e-mails. They allow people to stay in touch, establish and maintain relationships in more natural ways than e-mails. They help find solutions from even 'unknown' sources, tap onto the collective intelligence of communities. They also align and enable today's business models where enterprises work/collaborate with number of globally distributed partrners, vendors and employees to deliver projects or solve problems (this scale just cannot be met only by e-mails).
Note: Just imagine doing what we are doing right now (reading, responding and learning from this Blog, all at the same time) with e-mails!
I would urge everyone reading and commenting in this thread to experiment with Gist (http://gist.com).