Email banned at 75,000-employee company
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To put this in the best possible light, consider a rogue manager of a publicly traded company, who is discovered by the company and subsequently fired. If he does something bad with a legally-mandated paper trail, we're talking about discoverable material that would show up in any serious lawsuit about an unrelated matter. If we're talking about a crazy internal system that deliberately never logged anything in the first place, the company is open to much less legal liability.
Maybe the laws in question are so narrowly crafted that they apply only to email, I don’t know. Seems like a strange justification for the switch though.
then how about oral "instant messaging"?
This mitigation strategy only works if the law doesn't require you to retain the data. I've worked at communication companies that only retained email for 7 days, but they weren't obligated to retain their emails by law.
Of course, that's not to say this what Atos has in mind, but it's not a new tactic by any means.
The other thing to consider is that Microsoft Lync is also a phone and video chat system. Don't assume that IM replaces email -- I'd bet you would see alot of voice/video.
I'm not sure if Basecamp, Backpack, and Highrise are technically groupware but that's what I consider it. But really, these are all tools and there's no magic bullet. We just have to find a way to use right tools for the right job and make sure those we work with understand that each tool has its purpose. We'll have to explain to Joe Staffmember that email is not Google Docs and Skype isn't always a replacement for the telephone, etc.
If the law requires the retention of all electronic communication, not just email, as others have suggested then IM is subject to those same rules. Furthermore, most IM clients these days keep conversation logs anyway so I'm more apt to believe they thing they're helping productivity. But you could be very right and it is an angle most of the commenters, including myself, have missed.
One drawn out litigation is all you need to start a chain of legal holds that end up forcing you to retain email indefinitely. One of the organizations that I'm familiar with is retaining all email sent or received since 1992, due to a series of long-standing lawsuits. If you're retaining email for one litigation, it can and will be used in a subsequent litigation if you have it.
But on the other hand, many, if not most email communications are ephemeral in nature. In many large companies and government especially, IM was seen as a toy that kids played with, and was banished from corporate networks. At the same time, they provide NO convenient tools for sharing data and NO ability to search through the limited data storage options available.
The result? Employees use email to send IM-like messages, and the mailbox becomes a defacto, uncontrolled, electronic file cabinet.
So if you let people take care of ephemeral communications with IM/voice/video, (especially voice/video) you probably improve communications and limit liability. And if you use sharepoint or a similar tool to share stuff, you can setup retention policies, etc to manage those risks.
This doesn't seem too hard to me. If we've really decided as a society to make corporations track and retain data about their everyday operations and internal communication, then let's DO THAT. This silliness about whether it's ASCII text sent as email, or ASCII text sent as text messages, is just embarrassing.
Web messaging applications that do everything server-side are much more readily "locked down" in this regard (properly designed web mail would work just as well).
Sure, it's all just data, and if I'm sufficiently clever I can always make copies of it. But then I'm operating outside the policy. The point is that if everyone follows the policy, all data that shouldn't be retained won't be. It's much easier to write and implement such a data retention policy when the data's only permanent home is on a server.
With a newsgroup, you've got a nice threaded discussion. If some people start discussing something you aren't interested in, it is easy to skip those messages. If someone comes in late, they can see the past messages.
If I were setting up the internal communications for a company, I'd consider newsgroups, with a newsgroup per project and a newsgroup per department, as the main non-private method for project and department discussion. IM would be used for short things that you want a quick response on. Email would be used for one on one things that are not appropriate for the newsgroups and too long or not urgent enough for IM. Probably have a wiki or something like that for evolving documentation.
So, basically, let's eliminate the form of electronic communication that has some semblance of permanency (e-mail) and replace it with an ephemeral one (Facebook-style chat) and one that doesn't lend well to archiving, indexing and search (IM).
E-mail is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used wisely, or it can be used poorly. If it's being used poorly, why isn't the solution to fix how people are using it? And how the heck is 18% of the e-mail that reaches users spam? Do they not use filters?
The article just means his company is shifting to something like Jive instead of Exchange.
Maintaining an internal mail system is a gigantic headache for many reasons. You have continual spam and phishing attacks from the outside as well as internal users using their email as a document repository. Closing off the external threat and using purpose built software for document exchange and internal communication is totally sensible.
I used to work in this field. I do not recommend trying to break into it, there does not appear to be a market here.
I disagree that there is no market for this. Jive's S1 says they have 15M enterprise users spread out over 600+ companies.
If something needs to be permanent, you should create a real document and publish it to a shared repository. That way knowledge, history and commentary is kept in a single place and not distributed throughout everyone's inboxes.
Also, email is great for showing record of communication. It's subject-based (except for the idiots who reply to an email with contents that have nothing to do with the subject) so it can be easily categorized and remembered. "Where was that email Rick sent? Oh yeah it was around the beginning of Nov, and the subject had 'wombats' in it." Sometimes you need a subject-based list of records.
I really think anything people end up "inventing" to replace email will wind up being the exact same thing as email, but with a less distributed architecture.
Again, this is just my wild speculation but I got this funny feeling that this move was a chance for them to kill two birds with one stone. Solve a problem with a radical new solution while getting attention for it. I really don't think the media jumps all over company communication policies unless someone is spoon feeding them the story. I can just imagine some marketing guy writing a press released entitled "Hip Twch Firm Abandons Email, Paves the way for the Future of Communication".
Sillier things have happened.
I have a love/hate relationship with email. It's definitely good in theory, but in reality there are hundreds of problems with it.
One example: I get hundreds of CC'd emails a day ( I'm CEO ) and people assume that I read them and memorize them. Sure, it's a super low overhead way for other people to update me on all sorts of progress. However, I don't need that kind of visibility. I train people to make decisions autonomously and give me weekly updates. I can do that because I'm everyone's boss and I'm still drowning under the flood of well meaning CCs. I'm sure it's worse for most.
I've proposed some form of email tax by recipient. Like, you get 100 recipients per day free or something. Slow down and use them well. The time you try to save by being vague and sending out garbage is time that all your recipients spend trying to figure out what you want from them and whether it's more important than whatever else they're doing.
I see lots of emails floating around where I have to respond, "Please file a bug and move the conversation there before all of this is lost." Then you get the, "I just got a new cat!" email sent to all with hundreds of, "yay!" responses. I'm glad you got a new cat. I'd be happy to "like" your post on yammer. I'm not happy to get an email every time someone else wants to congratulate you on your cat acquisition.
I build up a lot of email debt and every once in a while I manage to get rid of some things. Part of it is tooling (I'd like a sort of "shelf life" for email in my mail reader), but part of it is just how easy it is for humans to do the one thing that amplifies into a time sink for everyone else.
Actually, email is really only a delivery method, just as facebook message or skype IM is just a delivery method. I think the solution to this problem is what the client does on receiving that message (or probably what my mail server does).
If my boss sends me a job he wants doing, then that message should go into a to-do bucket, with a due date and reminders. If that message is telling me that a domain name was auto-renewed for £x, it should ping my online accounts software and reconcile it with the bank transaction.
Doing this would eliminate the need for me to have an inbox, all of these things would go somewhere useful and actionable.
Stopping emails will not stop people sending me blocks of text that I need to read and process.
The problem is that most people at big companies suck massively at communication, and that that lack of skill wastes thousands of hours of valuable programmer time. The only way I can have a really productive day at work is to stay home, keep my email closed, and not work on systems that depend on any shared infrastructure. No wonder our market cap is less than our assets :)
Two months ago, I implemented the nuclear rule on my inbox. - if my email is not in to or cc - if the mail isn't sent to whitelisted lists - if body doesn't contain certAin keywords -> the mail is stored in a "not sent to me" folder which I check less and less frequently. Merlin Mann definitely inspired this experiment.
It's been working great. I've been more productive and have missed very little.
If I'm on vacation, I'm not online to receive an IM. Anything important that needs work from me would have instead been filed as a bug and can be assigned to me on my return if it hasn't been fixed yet.
A former co-worker at a different company had a policy that he would only read/write email before noon each day. I think something like that may be a better strategy than discarding email altogether company-wide. When you need an answer right away, you could always use the phone. And for him at least this did not result in people dropping by his office or his phone ringing all the time.
If you have a look back at how long the death of email has been predicted you can go about as far back as the first email service created. Not everyone adopted it.
If you want to go back to 2005 you might like the point of view of Stowe Boyd http://sto.ly/uCnRMs regarding this article. Also, I've been on talks/panels on the topic as far back as 2009 http://bit.ly/9ENcpJ and again in 2010 http://bit.ly/bG7DVz complete with a sad rendering of an inline Google Wave.
How do I feel now about email? Mixed.
What I do agree with is the notion of email as a lowest common denominator for exchanging information has a lasting value. What I do not agree with is that email is /enough/ for everyone.
Today, you have lots of choices in how you use email or elect to treat it (or ignore it) so that only the most relevant things are presented to you. If you are a company/corporation and you are planning to allow for employee communication the effectiveness of any solution is far removed from just email these days. If anything, we're generating more silos now than we ever have.
To the other comments here regarding Salesforce/Chatter, groupware, etc... I get that -- in fact I use that -- but there are still TONS [2] of people that steadfastly maintain that email is the only thing that lets them use their iPhone or Crackberry without jumping through the hoops of corporate VPNs or other hoop jumping exercises to reach a web groupware app that just fundamentally FAILED to ever take into consideration the mobile experience.
[1] Yay disclosure! http://fudge.org/disclosure/ [2] totally scientific... yes, you can quote that
My favorite aspect of this was the ability to include someones username in a post (much like on Facebook, via @username). This would actually ping them to let them know their attention was required, otherwise you can keep up to date with Yammer threads at your own pace. This is not the case with email.
Maybe I'm just old, but I much, much, much prefer stored systems like email which I can ignore when I need, keeps nice queue of what I've received/read, has folders/filtering/taging/search, ability to archive/save important messages.
Vs IM/Twitter/IRC constant stream systems. Which constantly distract me with msgs I care little about and when I ignore them it's easy to miss and hard to discover I missed something important.
Wiki-style or Facebook-style application might SEEM better alternatives to email, but as soon as most people in the company start using these applications instead of email, guess what? All those superfluous, time-wasting messages that were clogging up the email system will start clogging up the new applications. It's human nature.
A much better approach IMO would be to transition away from old-fashioned corporate email applications like OutLook/Exchange to newer ones (like Gmail) that make employees more productive/efficient.
Whatever the fallout, it will make for an interesting experiment. Personally I think most of the staff will rely on personal email addresses :)
These happen, and in very large companies these issues can degenerate fast unless your email admins are on their toes. Repeat the incident once a year and it's fine. Repeat it once a month and you have a failing email system with very visible streaks of 200+ mails/day.
Their points on the disadvantages of email are true and good but they may be overlooking its good points and the downsides to using IM.
Spam can be quickly deleted. While its an annoyance there are Ways to curb the amount received.
Lots of not useful email is sent but there are lots that are useful.
The cool thing about email is that you can choose to ignore it easily and come back later. When you substitute IM for email you're opening a can of worms that can be worse. An IM is harder to ignore, people expect an instant response and people will still use it for communicating less than useful info still.
When you have an IM client open all the time you're going to have to context switch more often than with email. With email you may get a little alert via something like the Mail.app sound for new mail or a Growl type notification but you know it can wait. With IM you're going to be switching over immediately. Context switching kills productivity and this policy will make matters worse.
The better solution would to implement a policy that stops people from sending ridiculously not useful emails. They aren't solving the problem but just putting it into a new context.
But then I'm reminded of a story here on HN from a day ago from the Atlantic that talks about how folks like us can easily criticize but if we're so smart why aren't we running that company. It may not apply here but it just popped into my head.