That’s what a major IT company plans to do.
I’ve long thought that for intra-organization communications blogs are much better than email. I was very concerned a few years ago when I was consulting for a major aerospace corporation (which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) how much technical work was going on in emails that were difficult to archive or search properly.
Yeah. I worked for almost three years to get a wiki set up, only to have the rollout vetoed by a single, unrelated (non-engineering) manager who refused to see the benefits of it to engineering.
So instead, everything is dumped into a PDM system which might as well be a black hole.
…The related point being, the wiki was intended to eliminate exactly the problem you describe in your last paragraph.
Try that in a law firm, and then we are talking.
Ok, I understand the benefits of wiki, user content websites, blogs etc… even over email. However, there are some other fundamental problems:
Claiming that only 20 out of every 200 emails received by his staff every day turn out to be important, Mr Breton said: ‘The e-mail is no longer the appropriate tool. It is time to think differently.
Unless those 180 emails are pure spam; I suspect much of them were interoffice communications. If your people are creating that much useless material (even if half was spam and the other half interoffice), then the problem is your people. Getting rid of email might cause them to try other tactics that are more productive, but it’s a minor remedy to a serious problem.
I do agree that instant message has benefits over email. But again, the benefits do not solve the problem of unimportant communication taking over a large amount of employee’s daily working time. Further, instant communication protocols typically do not have archival features, so if some critical information was shared by IM, it may get lost. If you work at IPCC, that may be a feature more than a bug.
“Our people are using email unproductively, so let’s just ban email”… is… wow, that’s stupid.
Plainly “biggest IT companies” are not smart. On the other hand, they won’t be that big for long at this rate.
Like Leland said – the problem is not email, it’s how they’re encouraging or requiring people to use it, culturally or by policy.
Here at my company we use email, and we use instant messages, and we use our CRM and issue tracking systems.
(We’ve even used Wikis, but they’ve been far more work than the benefit provided justified, so that’s pretty much died a natural death.)
BTW i’m in a company where wiki ( 3 different implementations so far ) has been the choice tool of cinternal omms for about 6 years, with a lot of instant messaging backing it up .. there are some things for which this works perfect, but for a lot of things wiki ends up being a write-only resource, meaning a lot of stuff that gets written up there is never read by anyone, simply because people were not even aware that a certain topic or area does exist somewhere in the depths of wiki.
Another problem is that wiki is naturally very unstructured, and you have to have a ton of discipline to make it structured, and useful. Build categories, tag clouds, hierarchies etc etc. It does not magically just build itself, there are usually actually dedicated people working on certain information improving its usability. Also making sure the information does not go stale ..
And in a lot of cases people now default to subscribing to RSS feeds from their networks and teams wiki updates, relevant area wiki updates, and order front page updates to their email ..
Heck, someone could do a pretty good case study here about what works and what doesn’t work well with wikis, blogs, internal forums and RSS feeds.
For every e-mail that you send to a list-server, a nail gets pounded into your backside in Purgatory.
Yea I’d say about 80% of email problems are PEBKAC issues. Occasionally I’ll run across a customer that gets it and just keeps it simple stupid and uses a competent desktop search app to comb through his/her emails. But most [older] people I find are the ones spending needless hours throughout the day dragging and dropping one email at a time into sub-folders of minutia description. These users I dread the most when they lose a folder because they haven’t a clue where anything is stored or what’s it called. I’ll look through their backups and see that they’ve created 30 .pst files, none of which are more than a few hundred megs, and saved in the most baroque locations on their hard drive; i.e., Old older personal folders old archive.old.old.pst.old.pst stored in the c:\default user\temp directory (and of course is where they put all their new stuff). Or, they’re irate howling to the rafters cause they lost their archived email and “I gotta have this stuff ASAP or I can’t do my job!!!11!”. I say, “What’s the name of the folder you are putting your archived items into?” the customer says, “Uhhhhh, Deleted Items folder…” *facepalm*
Trac.. combination wiki, bug tracker and revision control integration. Of course, we also have Sugar CRM and a failure to integrate the two systems 🙁
In other words, does this mean everyone gets a Minitel terminal on their desk?
Can we include a ban on Instant Messaging too … it is 10 times worse than e-mail in a corporate environment. Everyone wants to IM you instead of picking up the phone to talk.
So, instead of having to spend half an hour dispensing with fifty crap emails at my leisure, I’ll have to deal with ten crap phone calls that interrupt me when somone else feels the need to do so, and forty crap voicemails paced slow enough that it takes a minute or two to reliably characterize them as crap.
People who waste my time aren’t going to suddenly turn brilliantly insightful just because the medium changes. And it is unlikely they are going to shut up. So I think I’d prefer they stick to the medium that makes it easiest for me to dispense with the crap.
Why can’t people grow a backbone and demand no interruptions?
Trent, I have learned in a life as an Aspie that doing that immediately makes about half the people in the organization assume that you think they are worthless. They then stop communication altogether, without telling others they won’t pass info to you that others are counting on you to have. At the worst, this intensifies demands that you be fired for not being a team player, which the boss of an Aspie often gets about twice a month, anyway.