IDC reports the future of email is social - sponsored by IBM
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An IDC report came out in February 2012 stating how the future of email is social. I was interested to see that IBM was the sponsor of the paper.
This IDC white paper takes a look at the current state of enterprise email and the perceived and real problems that surround its use. The paper discusses the changing nature of collaboration and work fueled by the social web by examining current email trends and the emergence of new social collaboration tools. Rather than envision "a world without email," it revels a future where email converges with social tools...
The paper begins with a situation overview and a team that needs to work on a project before jumping to a section on the history of email and a statistic that email will reach 2.4 billion users by the year 2014.
The paper covers the standard challenges about the number of emails, mobile access and blurring personal and business use of devices and email. Filtering is given a section on pages 4-5 which I feel is the basis for most of the overload.
The current introduction of the social software is causing over subscription to occur and users will begin to ignore social information and feel overwhelmed as they do now with email. It is not uncommon to hear of users getting 300-500 emails per day. Imagine a world when you get hundreds of emails plus hundreds of unimportant status updates, notices of files being updated and someone posting a bookmark.
Do we not already communicate with other employees over IM and even email? Adding a new layer shifts how we communicate, not changing the effective way in which we do. Adding in tons of status updates adds to the stream that can never be caught up with.
Activity stream are more effective at organizing certain kinds of work than the traditional inbox concept, generally allowing much more flexibility and user configurability
How does a stream add appropriate filing for later use and retrieval? What about full text searching? Right now an inbox can, but do we need a master storage for all activity in the stream and then tons of access controls based on security and who you follow?
And while there is some reduction in use, email continues on as a necessary business tool
So the issue is moving specific contextual data out to social sites to make data more accessible to employees. That makes sense. Totally. Context importance is an individual feature and hard for employees to grasp. It seems we have this need to look for more data than we can consume.
Many social tools have tried to be smart filters and learn from your likes, but none have taken off. Some are still in use, but transforming people to trust a tool to actually find and bring relevant content to the front just doesn't happen.
I agree with moving files to secured and shared storage facilities to ease the silo effect a mailbox has. I am unsure about moving some email strings to microblogs as they are not meant for anything past updating in the moment type news. Not a breathing string. Workflow, task management and approval processes can live in email and possible the stream. The current comfort level for employees is in the inbox. It goes everywhere we go.
I also support the idea of blogs and some wiki type formats to build documentation and sources of expertise. This blog has been around for nine years and is a source of my own searching many times. Mailfiles contain tons of data yet are silos for that type of information. However, I don't find much of it in my mailfile anyway, do you? I search for business information that would not be on a blog or wiki. Such as customer specific information. I am also not "switching context" as they are all Notes databases to me so I am in one app.
You can read more in the IBM sponsored whitepaper from IDC. I would be interested in your thoughts as well.
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On Thursday, May 24th, 2012 by Chris Miller
