I was talking a little while back with an IT manager responsible for the technology package used by the road warriors at a large global consulting company. She told me about all the different digital meeting rooms (DMRs) she and her team had tried to deploy, and about how none of them had ever caught on.
As at most big consultancies, analysts, managers, and partners in this company work together in relatively stable teams for the life of a project. Team members communicate extensively and intensively with each other, but long ago stopped using voice mail to do so when they weren’t in the same room. Email, of course, has replaced voice mail, and has been for some time the company’s communication backbone. Email is used for collaboration, coordination, updates, conversations, private chats, and almost every other form of interaction at a distance.
This was considered an issue for a couple reasons. Heavy email volumes increase storage requirements and make backup and synchronization a pain. More fundamentally, many at the company believe that email is a lousy tool for generating group-level knowledge and sharing it. I got the sense that the IT manager and many of her colleagues had come to the conclusion that, as Bill French put it, “email is where knowledge goes to die.”
This is a problem at a consultancy, where the only valuable assets are knowledge assets (assuming that the shiny downtown offices are leased). Email is also a pretty lousy technology for keeping track of any particular extended collaboration, the elements of which are invariably chopped up and distributed across many messages, replies, ccs and bccs, and so on.
Because of all of this, the company had at several points introduced technologies that were supposed to do better a job than email of supporting a group’s interactions and harvesting its fruits. These tools had included dedicated wikis, virtual team rooms, and related offerings from Groove, Lotus, Microsoft, and others.
The IT manager estimated that she and her team had rolled out at least ten different DMRs in recent years. And she was clear that all of them had failed. None were widely or deeply used, and none had made any serious dent in the company’s steady torrent of email.
I don’t think her experience is atypical, and I don’t think it should be ignored. In fact, I think it’s time for Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts to give up their frontal assault on email – their war on words (it’s your father’s technology, it’s a dinosaur, it’s where knowledge goes to die) and their attempts to build and/or deploy replacement technologies.
I say this for two main reasons:
Email has some positive attributes. As I wrote a while back, “Email is freeform, multimedia (especially with attachments), WYSIWYG, easy to learn and use, platform independent, social, and friendly to mouse-clickers and keyboard-shortcutters alike.” It can be used effectively by everyone at the consultancy, from a junior associate with a laptop in a hotel to Blackberry-addicted partner hopping among airports. It works well enough on both big and small screens. I admire Luis Suarez for his experiment in living his professional life without email, but I don’t want to replicate it.
Email is the incumbent technology. It’s beneficiary of the 9X effect, and so hard to uproot. It’s the collaboration technology of choice for lots of knowledge workers, particularly older ones. And these older folk are generally the people in charge. They’re the ones responsible for defining, executing, and delivering the work of the organization. This means that they get to call this shots, and if they want to communicate with colleagues and receive in-process and finished work product via email, they will.
When this is the case, the value of using other group-level collaboration technologies goes way down. A group of collaborators and I once started to write a paper using a wiki to hold drafts, to-do lists, supporting documents, etc. Things went swimmingly until one of the senior folk in the group started asking questions and sending thoughts via email. Because she was a valuable contributor we didn’t want to ignore her, and because she was senior we couldn’t dictate what tools she had to use to collaborate. The rest of us soon saw that it was at least twice as much work to maintain two parallel work streams, and eventually walked away from the wiki.
I appreciate that Millennials have different technology preferences and often prefer to use emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) instead of email and other channel technologies. But I also appreciate that almost without exception they enter the workforce in junior roles, and so are in no position to dictate terms about digital tools or anything else. Yes, there is a war for talent, including young talent. But there’s also a severe recession on, and plenty of talented people looking for work. With US unemployment around 10% and talk of a jobless recovery in the air, I wonder how many members of Generation Y will actually walk away from a paid gig just because the communication tools in use don’t suit them.
So does acceptance of email mean abandonment of Enterprise 2.0? Of course not. Email might have a long tenure ahead as the communication technology of choice for strongly-tied colleagues, as well as for sporadic communications (especially private ones) among weakly- or non-tied people. But that’s not any kind of death blow for Enterprise 2.0.
ESSPs do things that email just can’t. Blogs and microblogs (like Twitter and Yammer) let us narrate our work and broadcast our expertise. Microblogs and discussion forums let us do the opposite, broadcasting our questions and requests and giving everyone, close colleagues and strangers alike, the chance to help us out. Social networking software lets us stay current with lots of people with little effort. And prediction markets harness collective intelligence, providing clear and accurate answers to difficult questions about the future.
All of these activities have proved valuable, both on the public Internet and on company’s private online properties. They’re all examples of ESSPs’ ability to knit people together in novel and productive ways, to harness, collect, and share knowledge (without formally trying to ‘manage’ it like we used to) and to increase the degree of self-organization in an organization. And email supports none of them. It’s good for a lot of things, but it doesn’t deliver the benefits discussed here (which are covered in more detail in my book on E2.0).
I find that facilitating small group collaboration among strongly-tied people is a fairly uninteresting use case for ESSPs, because it’s already covered (imperfectly? haltingly? adequately?) by email. Many other activities aren’t. And because we don’t have any track record of supporting these activities with technology I think we tend to ignore or at least devalue them a bit.
In a later post I’ll talk more about why doing so is a really bad move. I want to end this one by asking if I’m making an important mistake by, as this post’s title suggests, stopping worrying and learning to love (or at least declare a truce with) email. Is this a copout? Does email need to go in order for Enterprise 2.0 to take off? Leave a comment, please, and let us know what you think.
p.s. I’ve just started using Google Wave, a collaboration support technology from the folk who brought us the PageRank algorithm, Gmail, and Google Scholar (OK, that last one is a parochial choice, but it’s so much better than previous tools for sifting through academic literature). I like what I’ve seen so far, but need colleagues to experiment with. My gmail identity is amcafee – reach out and let’s start messing with this thing.
Wave or something like it might be the better mousetrap we’ve been waiting on for supporting unstructured team work, but that’s very different than saying it’s the one-stop shop for Enterprise 2.0.
p.p.s. I’ve changed unessential details about some of the people and companies described above in order to preserve privacy and confidentiality.
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
I would agree there are many use cases for email that are simply unbeatable; but at the same time email has also been (mis?)used as just the only thing that was available for some scenarios that Enterprise 2.0 apps can do a better job at. Examples include collaboration on (large) files with centralized version management, group addresses where incoming requests have to be dispatched and responded to, audit trail, etc. and it is indeed possible that in a consultancy environment these are not primary drivers.
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 !
You are spot on about the pointlessness of trying to kill email. The best we can do is try to bring alternatives up to the same level of usefulness as email.
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 page 11. I'd love it if you and your readers could give me some critique.
Hmm, surprisingly there are no comments yet… Great post! I don't think you're missing anything. The research I've done in the past shows email is the habitat of a knowledge worker. (Refer to paper by Ducheneaut & Bellotti, “Email as a habitat”.) For us this implied new tools have to integrate with email in some way, preferably very tightly. I know this is difficult, but we found this is one of the way knowledge workers will use new tools and functionality. Just see how many people are reading their feeds from Outlook. In this sense I think the way MS is integrating Outlook, Office and Sharepoint is very smart. Posterous is seemingly also relating to this, by supporting users to update their lifestream right from their email.
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!
Ah, more comments while I was commenting! Agree with you, Daniel! Email is good at mending broken business processes.
Samuel, I like the quote from your link here but I disagree with the accompanying analysis:
Email is great for generating alerts to notify us of exceptions or incoming messages. My only quibble is that the email works better if it contains a link to the web application that hosts the exception information or the discussion (like say a Twitter DM) 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.
I'll echo other commenters, both here and elsewhere on the Web, in praising the post. You've delved back into how organizations through collaborate through technology, focusing on what works and where the pain points are.
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 could not agree more with your analysis and wanted to share one of my experiences from several years ago (2006-ish):
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.
Maybe what we need to evolve to is the correct time and place for email. Hey, I actually love gmail, to be honest. But I reject your suggestion that those of us who have become accustomed to the most expeditious use of email must bow to those in authority who refuse to learn new tools (and slow down our productivity). That's harsh, I know, but the reality is– there are more efficient, more productive ways of working that happen to involve the 2.0 practices we've assimilated into our work life that, yes, don't include email.
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 I guess it is up to me to be one of the dissenting voices here. I am just going to quote Henry Ford (I believe, and paraphrase) when he said that if you asked people at the time of the model F what they would prefer to have in a car they would have said a faster horse.
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)
Great analysis. I would add that ubiquitous mobile access to e-mail, online/offline & from a pc/browser/mobile device, gives it an edge over many of the alternatives 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.
I agree with your analysis, though I must admit I was not aware of a discussion e-mail vs ESSPs.
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. I believe the reason e-mail is so powerful is because at the moment it is the seamless one-stop solution where you can do all of this.
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!
I just keep trying. I keep inviting my colleagues (all older than me; I'm 25) to use Doodle, Google Docs, etc but I know that email is the fall-back. I have turned some folks on to the benefits of these services for collaboration purposes, so it's just a work in progress to me, to get folks to use them. I always offer to help train them, and I'm a pretty patient teacher. Maybe I'm lucky, or maybe I work with very open-minded people, but I haven't found any huge roadblocks to using better collaborative tools. The key I think is offering to teach people how to use it without being arrogant, and to be patient.
Nice posting on some of the challenges that the enterprises face today. Often I am asked about the modern office with no email and web 2.0 capabilities, but as you stated it breaks when someone reverts to the traditional (should I call it that?) tool that is email. Email compliments such a vast number of other tools in the ether and as the older ones of us in the workforce retire we will see email used more for a notification channel and less of a medium to exchange content. With distributed teams there is a great deal of value in the ESSP's being used for collaborative activities. As tools provide federated capabilities where organisational boundaries are overcome with the correct security policies implemented we may have more cooperative style enterprises emerge, but only time will tell….
Good thinking. Let me add my own slightly different, but coherent view on this.
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.
Agree! That quote isn't mine, to be clear. Yes, I get more emails with links to platforms I participate in, then emails from colleagues!
I respectfully disagree Mr. McAfee.
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.
Jeez, I hope the acronym ESSP doesn't catch on. Explaining what that means to someone clinging to email with his or her cold dead fingers ain't gonna be fun!
Andy – great post and I mostly agree with you, but also agree with Susan (itsinsider above) that we should not just bow to email b/c the existing leadership defaults to it.
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.
at frank, we say “you can't optimize a 2.0 business with a 1.0 mindset,” and narrow-mindedly clinging to email sure smacks of that attitude – not that I don't get caught managing projects through email myself! surrounded by the tools, knowledge and promise of 2.0 tech, about eight members of our team crashed through a website launch yesterday using email + texting to update, share, edit, approve, tweak, brainstorm and finally go live with the new site. we made it. but we're all healing from a traumatic experience this morning.
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!
Andy,
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?
Dear Andrew, Thank you for the pragmatic analysis.
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!
As Stuart McRae points out, for mobile professionals nothing can come close to email. Most ESSP environments and tools are aimed squarely at the laptop/desktop — which is great if you spend most of your time at a desk. As Andy's anecdote makes clear, it doesn't matter if 9 of the 10 team members are sitting comfortably at a desk: in almost any organization, the top folks are likely to be taking the information in and passing new information on while they're in a cab, a queue, or an elevator. The bridge between the two environments would have an email interface, but be archived and searchable by the group. ListServ 2.0, anyone?
Great article Andrew. Ironically, I coined that phrase in 1999 while presenting to the Australian Computing Society, about three blocks from the offices of the Google Wave team.
I would urge everyone reading and commenting in this thread to experiment with Gist (http://gist.com).
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