E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago
November 19th, 2005Again, I’m just sayin’. Well, it’s BusinessWeek this time. From the article:
“No surprise, then, that on Rangaswami’s orders, e-mail at Dresdner is beginning to fade as the collaboration tool of choice. Instead, workers there, as well as at places like Walt Disney (DIS ), Eastman Kodak (EK ), Yahoo! (YHOO ), and even the U.S. military, are ditching e-mail in favor of other software tools that function as real-time virtual workspaces. Among them: private workplace wikis (searchable, archivable sites that allow a dedicated group of people to comment on and edit one another’s work in real time); blogs (chronicles of thoughts and interests); Instant Messenger (which enables users to see who is online and thus chat with them immediately rather than send an e-mail and wait for a response); RSS (really simple syndication, which lets people subscribe to the information they need); and more elaborate forms of groupware such as Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT ) SharePoint, which allows workers to create Web sites for teams’ use on projects.
Though the likeliest scenario is that e-mail will remain the prime tool for notification and one-to-one communication, “a huge percentage of collaboration will occur outside of e-mail, with a continued rise in these other tools,” says Clay Shirky, associate teacher in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University. “There’s an enormous untapped value to be gotten by getting collaboration right.”
I actually refuse to take part in group work via e-mail (personal and professional), relying more on F2F, blogs, or wikis for this type of work. I still do one on one e-mail, but much prefer that people either call my cell phone or send a quick IM. There are so many new collaboration tools on the market that could easily replace e-mail as a group-work device. Do we need to start talking about E-mail 2.0?