Oct 22nd, 2008 |
I’m sure more than once in the last few years you’ve heard a product or service pitch that promises to enable your users to move away from reliance on e-mail for collaboration. Yes we all know the drill. E-mail is cumbersome, there’s too much spam, not enough workflow management, and on and on. While collaboration applications such as wikis and shared workspaces are thriving, the reality is still that when it comes to collaboration, e-mail is still king no matter who rises up and attempts a coup.
Now, a new wave of collaboration vendors is emerging that are trying to fix e-mail rather than replace it. I had the chance this week to see a demo of C-Mail, a start-up that aims to improve e-mail efficiency by providing prioritization of incoming e-mails based on learned or pre-configured behavior, along with the ability to tie e-mail to work flows (similar functionality is available from Xobini and Clear Context). Perhaps we’re on the cusp of finally accepting the fact that e-mail isn’t going away any time soon, and instead the time has come to look at ways of improving the application we all use?
Thanks for posting this! It knocked loose a few thoughts and motivated me to write up this post: Easier to marginalize e-mail than to kill it. http://www.sharingatwork.com/2008/10/easier-to-marginalize-e-mail-than-to.html
My idea is that we’ve got to retain the ability for users to link up to our new systems via their inboxes. Maybe your boss’s boss won’t look at your new social network unless it comes to his Blackberry. It’s not too hard to set up a social network -> rss feed -> auto email sender toolchain.
This is an important and under-appreciated topic. I think the point is even more dramatic than you suggest. Email actually works _extremely_ well for what it is designed to do: asynchronous 99% guaranteed delivery. You know, when you don’t get an email response that the person on the other end is ignoring you, too busy, or ineffective. There is low probability of “oh I missed that,” the sort of excuse people might make about not having caught important news on TV.
So if email isn’t broken, but it still presents as a problem, it is our work culture that relies on it that’s broken.
People make a big deal of the silly stuff: spam is actually a non-issue. The filters work well enough, and it takes me milliseconds to recognize and delete stuff that doesn’t get caught. The issue is with the quantity of legitimate email that comes through.
Some of it can, no doubt, move to blogs, wikis and the like, and I am already seeing shifts in behavior towards that where possible. This will possibly lower the volume of email by maybe 20% for disciplined workgroups.
The rest of the 80% needs that asynchronous-but-guaranteed attribute of email.
Good points Venkat. Lately I think that e-mail is better suited for alerts than for conversations. I like getting ten emails from Facebook and Twitter notifying me of recent activity, but when I’m *talking* to people I’d much rather use IM or a phone or tweets.
I think e-mail is still a really good tool for collaboration, as a huge chunk of our business communication still happens through e-mails. Now, there are some collaboration tools available in the market which actually makes the e-mail accounts much more powerful than before. f.e. Taroby [http://www.taroby.org ] is a SaaS based e-mail collaboration tool which greatly improves the internal and external communication of teams, by providing the facility to share e-mail accounts among team members. Taroby also have a lot of other cool features, like unified messaging, task management, calender, calculator and many more…
We don’t need to kill e-mail as it is can still be effective, with these improved features…
Daniel, you hit the nail on the head when you say email is best suited for alerts, rather than conversations. Collaboration between People, Process and Information needs to be captured in a way that it can be used in multi-person conversations, promotes relevant collaboration, provides mechanism for feedback and opinion, and does not get lost for future reference. It’s unrealistic that corporate social networking will replace email entirely, but it would be more efficient to integrate both into the daily work and communications processes.
There is another great innovative company Nubli that automatically prioritizes your inbox into high medium and low. It also helps email management with its automatic tagging and dashboard. You can achieve zero inbox and reduce email stress by using Nubli. Also check out Venture beats article on Nubli
http://venturebeat.com/2009/09/22/demo-nubli-says-it-can-sort-your-e-mails-by-importance/