There has been a great deal of discussion about email recently. I think the proximate cause is the arrival of Google Wave, which is being heralded like the coronation of royalty. (I will leave a review of Wave to another venue, since the introductory video from Google is 85 minutes.) But the rise of tools like Twitter have also raised questions about the future state for email.

A few years ago, in 2004 or 2005, I was chairing a panel at Supernova on ‘The Future Of Email’. JP Rangaswami was there, as was a fellow from some email spam prevention company. I got in hot water immediately buy making the following arguments:

1. Email is not really well-designed relative to its ostensible purpose — which is to support communication between people that are well-known to each other, and have an on-going relationship, for example working on a project together within a company.
2. Email is very good at things that seem like spam: sending unsolicited and perhaps unwanted messages to people that are unknonw aside from their email address. The basic protocols of store-and-forwarding of email means that email can be filtered into spam folders, but it basically has to be delivered.
3. The adoption of instant messaging and chat products in business have been shown to decrease email and telephone communications by a sizable extent, sometimes as much as 30% or more. This suggest that features of these technologies — like persistent chat rooms, and instant message presence — offer real benefits that can’t be supported by telephone and email communication.
4. Lastly, there is a strong generational gradient away from email: teenagers and young people dislike it, and view it as a corporate tool that they only use to talk to companies, and never with their friends, with whom they are most likely to text or talk on the phone.

I suggested that the logical outcome of these trends was the eventual death of email, which would like follow some sort of S-curve, as people began to defect from it, and transition onto existing and as-then-unknown alternatives.

I was almost tarred and feathered. People were literally yelling at me, saying I was an idiot. Esther Dyson shook her head at me from the front row. Amy Wohl asked if I was unaware that email was the killer app of the Internet. Someone demanded his money back for the confernece, since he was interested in hearing of the future of email, not about some future in which email was no more.

But, now years later, with the aging of the boomers who consider email as an integral and eternal part of the web, the increased use of text, instant messaging, VoIP, and now microstreaming solutions like Twitter, my five year old pronouncements look like something from the sunday supplement of a newspaper. Like the recent piece in the WSJ by Jessica Vascellaro called Why Email No Longer Rules….

Vascellaro gets off to a good start:

Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.

In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.

But she stumbles and falls when she reverts to industrial era notions about personal productivity as the rationale for why we select different media to communicate, with the unexamined premise that we always choose what we do in order to be more productive:

You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. We get lured into wasting time, telling our bosses we are looking into something, instead of just doing it, for example. And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn’t meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication. Such as, say, talking to somebody in person.

So, five years after a time when talking about the death of email was seen as a subversive act, something like burning the flag, Vascellano fails to actually connect the real dots here. She holds to an old yardstick, where productivity trumps everything. However, in the new world of social tools connecting us, being connected to others trumps everything.

So we are slowly starving email, relegating it to a shorter and short list of appropriate uses. In time, it will fall off the edge, like fax is now that we can scan and send attachments more easily than using dedicated fax machines. We will find that email will be left with a short list of uses, like monthly mailing from the bank, or travel intineraries from Expedia. These relative impersonal communications with companies will be the final resting ground for email, and then, even that will wink out when a better metaphor for social interaction with companies becomes dominant.

And I doubt that we will miss it when it’s gone, either.

A recent report suggests that businesses are trying hard to block access to social networking:

[via press release

The survey was developed by Robert Half Technology, a leading provider of information technology (IT) professionals on a project and full-time basis, and conducted by an independent research firm. It was based on telephone interviews with more than 1,400 CIOs from companies across the United States with 100 or more employees.

CIOs were asked, “Which of the following most closely describes your company’s policy on visiting social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, while at work?” Their responses:

Prohibited completely 54%
Permitted for business purposes only 19%
Permitted for limited personal use 16%
Permitted for any type of personal use 10%
Don’t know/no answer 1%

I am not surprised by the attempt at blocking access. Businesses view us as parts of the corporate machinery, and our reason for existence is to work on behalf of the company. That’s why we get so little vacation time, sick leave, and maternity/paternity leave in comparison to other nations.

Here, only 19% will even allow use for business uses, only!

Of course, there is nothing to stop people from using their phones to remain connected on these services if the companies block them at the firewall. This is an escape hatch, but still a pain.

In a world where social networks are increasingly playing the role of early warming system and primary information resource, organizations that impose these sorts of draconian solutions will suffer, not benefit.

So Larry Ellison took the opportunity at a recent presentation to go off on a rant about cloud computing. He basically thinks it baloney.

His points (such as they are, when you pull away the Valley girl inflection he ascribes to a cloud computing advocate) are these:

1. Salesforce and Netsuite have been around almost ten years, and Oracle’s world hasn’t come to an end. (So I guess we are supposed to conclude that cloud computing doesn’t represent a future?)

2. He’s tired of people saying that they have been ‘doing’ cloud computing for years. (Huh?)

Of course Ellison wants to defang cloud computing as much as possible: it is a threat. The spectre of Amazon, Google, and applications running in the cloud on top of someone else’s technology platform has got to be the largest long-term strategic threat to his business. To the degree that the enterprise wants to get away from managing their own hardware and close source software — and who wouldn’t if they can get security and scaling issues resolved? — that is the hard stop in Oracle’s future.

I spent a great deal of time working on the Open Enterprise 2009 Research project earlier this year, leading up to the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I learned a great deal through the interviews with many thought leaders and practitioners, like Charlene Li, Euan Semple, Andy McAfee, Laurie Buczak, and Walton Smith, to name only a few. On reflection, I realized that in general the term Enterprise 2.0 was not used much, and no one spontaneously stepped forward with an impassioned argument as to why the term was even helpful.

Denis Howlett recently stated that Enterprise 2.0 is a crock, basically making the case that the knowledge management-ish arguments in support of E 2.0 don’t gibe with the way companies actually have to operate, what their drivers are, or what problems confront them. Andy McAfee responded with a not particularly brief or convincing response, stringing together a number of very narrow use cases — like bringing new hires up to speed, or internal prediction markets — and stating that since these problems exist, and since various solutions to those problems are being herded together as Enterprise 2.0ish applications, therefore Enterprise 2.0 is a good thing, worthy of our attention.

I think something more significant is at work, and those things called Enterprise 2.0 form only one bit of this bigger whole. The world in which work exists has changed fairly drastically in recent years, and so we are seeing a fundamental reset in the nature of work. On a secondary level, this translates into changes in how people communicate, coordinate, and collaborate, and this, then, leads to changes in information technology and related practices. Note, however, that talking about the secondary effects of these global business and social changes in and of themselves is, from my point of view, not a very illuminating exercise at the best, and at the worst, completely misleading.

In a way, you could interpret Denis’ polemic as making a similar point, but I don’t think that his perceptions are based on the sense of a sweeping change in the world of business, but rather the views that the timeless nature of business operations have nothing to do with knowledge management.

Howlett’s grumping is just some context for my point: ‘Enterprise 2.0′ is a not particularly useful characterization of what is going on with the spread of Web 2.0 technologies and practices in the world of business.

Note that I am a strong advocate for the use of the Web 2.0 handle, despite the various attempts by iconoclasts to topple it in 2008, or Arrington’s theory that a overpheromoned party of cool kids meant the demise of 2.0. I think Web 2.0 is fairly well-understood to represent a set of convergent and mutually supportive ideas — the Web as a platform, open standards, APIs, social tools, fast and low-cost development tools and techniques — that have come to define a generation of Web development and business.

Enterprise 2.0, on the other hand, does not have the same coherence. Perhaps this is because so many of the principles of Web 2.0 are blunted by the command-and-control needs of the enterprise. You cannot state that Enterprise 2.0 is Web 2.0 for the enterprise because much of what defines Web 2.0 does not easily translate to the enterprise context.

In particular, Web 2.0 as a phenomenon is strongly tied to social tools — social networking, social media, and so on — in which the individual is primary, and asymmetric networks of relationships with other individuals form the principal mechanism for connection and information flow. However, this does not gibe with the enterprise obsession with groups: where the rights and responsibilities of individuals are derived from group membership, and these rights are granted by the enterprise.

This apparently minor mismatch between the individualistic web and the organizational one desired by management leads me to believe that we are looking at the wrong end of the sausage machine. We need to switch our attention to the shifting nature of work itself, and how business needs to be reconsidered in a rapidly changing world (which includes a revolutionary social Web, notably). Toward that end, all manner of innovations, tools, and practices might be evaluated for their utility and impacts, but they cannot be considered hanging in space, in some sort of strategic vacuum.

First and foremost, management must settle on some principles around which work itself can be reworked. Difficult questions must be posed, and deep and principled thinking must take place before tactical software and business process changes can take place. In essence, forward-looking companies will devise something like a constitution and a bill of rights that attempt to lay out a worldview about the purpose of the firm, what it stands for, how it will treat its customers, what is expected from employees, and what the social contract between the company and individuals — employees and customers — is.

So, I have come to believe that this is the place where companies need to focus their attention: socializing the business, not adoption of Web 2.0.

I see that very smart folks in Dachis Group, Altimeter Group, and other upstart consulting firms are focusing on ‘Social Business’ as a defining theme, and I am lending my voice to that chorus.

In a time when we are shifting to a new, flow-oriented paradigm on information sharing and network-based coordination and collaboration, it might be fitting to focus on process and not its outcomes. Let’s leave the version numbering to one side, and accept the inevitability of reworking work into a much more social form. This will not be a one-time thing, but an ongoing and unending process of innovation.

In effect, we need to shift to a much more agile and adaptive way of thinking about social and collective action within businesses, and managing in a very different world than we were even a few years ago, back when Enterprise 2.0 might have seemed like a great term. Nowadays that term may be holding us back and confusing folks that haven’t been as close to the discussion as we have.

All too often, Enterprise 2.0 advocacy gets bogged down in a futile side issue: change.

To those that feel out of step with a large organization, change may seem appealing, like aloe vera for the sunburned. But for the great majority of people caught up in the everyday frenzy of day-to-day operations, change may be as welcome as a skunk at a picnic.

Euan Semple recently made the argument that change for change’s sake may alienate those whose support is most needed: senior management and those in change of the most central business processes.

[The secret to success with Enterprise 2.0 ...]

Don’t try to get your powerful people to behave differently – they have everything to lose. Don’t try to improve your existing processes – you will be seen to be breaking something.

Focus instead on the things that are desperately trying to happen but aren’t and the people who are desperately trying to connect but can’t. Do things that make the impossible possible and your success rate will soar.

So there is a very pragmatic allure to propose the use of Web 2.0 technologies to rapidly start making inroads on things that haven’t been done at all, or in areas where a tiny bit of push could have big impacts.

I interviewed Lee Bryant of Headshift (now Dachis) last spring and he made a similar point, although specifically he said the conventional wisdom that people resist change is simply wrong:

[Open Enterprise 2009: Lee Bryant Interview]

Lee makes the case that the meme about people being resisting change is a bit off the mark. People are open to adopting new things if they actually help, and will resist various vacuous arguments about ‘you need to change or die’ or psuedo-mystical mumbo-jumbo about emergent values and so on. He has found it best to position these tools in the simplest most straightforward and business-oriented way.

So, avoid arguments in favor of change as an innate good, and focus on practical and obvious areas where Web 2.0 technologies and business practices can quickly offer real and tangible benefits without disturbing mission-critical business processes or rocking the political boat.

In an interesting twist, Ulrike Reinhard interviewed me about the Open Enterprise 2009 study: