Lots of the comments here are missing the point. In my experience at enormous companies (that have had e-mail policies, in varying degrees, like this one), they have zero to do with productivity and have everything to do with the various laws, rules, and regulations surrounding data retention of e-mail.
To put this in the best possible light, consider a rogue manager of a publicly traded company, who is discovered by the company and subsequently fired. If he does something bad with a legally-mandated paper trail, we're talking about discoverable material that would show up in any serious lawsuit about an unrelated matter. If we're talking about a crazy internal system that deliberately never logged anything in the first place, the company is open to much less legal liability.
Forgive my ignorance, but if a company exists in an industry with mandated data retention/logging, wouldn’t those laws apply equally to IM as to email? In other words, if the law requires that internal communication be logged they’d be screwed either way in your scenario.
Maybe the laws in question are so narrowly crafted that they apply only to email, I don’t know. Seems like a strange justification for the switch though.
>wouldn’t those laws apply equally to IM as to email? In other words, if the law requires that internal communication be logged they’d be screwed either way in your scenario.
As someone who has written email and IM compliance software used by 22 of the top 25 banks I can tell you that there is a requirement for data retention of any electronic communication for the vast majority of financial institutions. If you're required by law to archive your communications you need to either comply or get an exemption from your regulator (highly unlikely).
This mitigation strategy only works if the law doesn't require you to retain the data. I've worked at communication companies that only retained email for 7 days, but they weren't obligated to retain their emails by law.
Companies often have policies which dictate rapid purging of communications and other documents (such as every month). This allows them to escape an Enron style paper shredding fiasco, and in certain industries is very advantageous.
Of course, that's not to say this what Atos has in mind, but it's not a new tactic by any means.
Yes. But relatively few industries actually have such a requirement. This particular company is a consulting company.
The other thing to consider is that Microsoft Lync is also a phone and video chat system. Don't assume that IM replaces email -- I'd bet you would see alot of voice/video.
In a country with a healthy, functioning government, this sort of deliberate corporate evasion would be swiftly recognized, and countered with rewrites to the legislation, or legislation which was more flexible to begin with.
This doesn't seem too hard to me. If we've really decided as a society to make corporations track and retain data about their everyday operations and internal communication, then let's DO THAT. This silliness about whether it's ASCII text sent as email, or ASCII text sent as text messages, is just embarrassing.
It's not deliberate evasion. Email systems weren't originally designed with strict data retention policies in mind. I know Exchange offers some features in this regard, but even there I doubt it's impossible for a user to innocently create an archive outside the reach of the policy.
Web messaging applications that do everything server-side are much more readily "locked down" in this regard (properly designed web mail would work just as well).
Sure, it's all just data, and if I'm sufficiently clever I can always make copies of it. But then I'm operating outside the policy. The point is that if everyone follows the policy, all data that shouldn't be retained won't be. It's much easier to write and implement such a data retention policy when the data's only permanent home is on a server.
Very interesting comment. Remember Groupwise or Lotus Notes - the whole groupware craze? This is a great argument for a tightly controlled proprietary internal communications system and I wonder if we might see a resurrection of the groupware fad.
The article says they are using Office Communicator, part of the Office suite, so I'd imagine they are going full-bore on that. Wonder if they are using SharePoint for the wiki, too.
I agree. I'm involved with 3 organizations of my own plus I work with countless businesses large and small. One is a web startup, the other a "small business" (there's a difference), one a registered non-profit, and then the various businesses that I'm a vendor for. In my experience I've seen a very obvious trend suggesting that everyone from single person operations all the way to corporate giants have to constantly battle to work together with employees, vendors, etc. because of a lack of a good communication system. I've introduced a few of them to the products the guys at 37Signals offer and those who use it love it.
I'm not sure if Basecamp, Backpack, and Highrise are technically groupware but that's what I consider it. But really, these are all tools and there's no magic bullet. We just have to find a way to use right tools for the right job and make sure those we work with understand that each tool has its purpose. We'll have to explain to Joe Staffmember that email is not Google Docs and Skype isn't always a replacement for the telephone, etc.
One drawn out litigation is all you need to start a chain of legal holds that end up forcing you to retain email indefinitely. One of the organizations that I'm familiar with is retaining all email sent or received since 1992, due to a series of long-standing lawsuits. If you're retaining email for one litigation, it can and will be used in a subsequent litigation if you have it.
But on the other hand, many, if not most email communications are ephemeral in nature. In many large companies and government especially, IM was seen as a toy that kids played with, and was banished from corporate networks. At the same time, they provide NO convenient tools for sharing data and NO ability to search through the limited data storage options available.
The result? Employees use email to send IM-like messages, and the mailbox becomes a defacto, uncontrolled, electronic file cabinet.
So if you let people take care of ephemeral communications with IM/voice/video, (especially voice/video) you probably improve communications and limit liability. And if you use sharepoint or a similar tool to share stuff, you can setup retention policies, etc to manage those risks.
All I know about the data retention regulations is that every system that stores text has to retain the data. That basically means we can't use wikis, nopaste, non-official chat (like IRC), and so on. Interestingly, we can have all the in-person and and phone conversations we want, though. It doesn't make much sense.
You might be right but the post was written in a way that implies its simply some asinine policy they think will help productivity.
If the law requires the retention of all electronic communication, not just email, as others have suggested then IM is subject to those same rules. Furthermore, most IM clients these days keep conversation logs anyway so I'm more apt to believe they thing they're helping productivity. But you could be very right and it is an angle most of the commenters, including myself, have missed.
I don't understand why usenet-like newsgroups have not caught on for internal company communication. A large part of typical internal email is sent to multiple recipients, such as everyone working on a project. A typical email client makes a total hash of this as people break off into side discussions of various parts of the various emails. Messages are either giant because people quote the entire previous thread, or they are confusing to anyone who comes in late if the entire thread is not quoted.
With a newsgroup, you've got a nice threaded discussion. If some people start discussing something you aren't interested in, it is easy to skip those messages. If someone comes in late, they can see the past messages.
If I were setting up the internal communications for a company, I'd consider newsgroups, with a newsgroup per project and a newsgroup per department, as the main non-private method for project and department discussion. IM would be used for short things that you want a quick response on. Email would be used for one on one things that are not appropriate for the newsgroups and too long or not urgent enough for IM. Probably have a wiki or something like that for evolving documentation.
I worked at a rather large company that did this and the newsgroups turned into total chaos. Posting to the newsgroup didn't have the same social stigma attached as sending a mass email or hitting "reply to all." This led to people posting rants, the latest chain messages, and some pretty off color things. Of course, management went ape over this and decided to just scrap the entire system instead of fixing the cultural problems.
We periodically try this at our company, and in fact mailing lists are also available as newsgroups. Most people don't use the newsgroups. Part of the problem is on the client side - Thunderbird keeps newsgroups as separate folders so you don't have a unified inbox the way you do with email. So you have to check each folder and see if there's anything new. People like the immediacy of email and having one place to check for new messages. On the server side, newsgroups don't track things like whether you've read a message or not. So you can't easily move between a laptop and phone and still have things kept in sync - all of your interactions have to happen through a single client program.
It really depends on the culture. When I joined a midsize company, I noticed there was no newsgroup/forum kind of communication medium. I took upon myself to convince management it's a great idea to have one in addition to email. However, after implementation the forums were rarely used. The excuses people gave were they are too busy, they don't want public discussion, they don't know whether there will be replies to their posts, etc. It was a flop. The culture of open communication just wasn't there.
We recently set up an internal reddit server at work and it seems like it will be fucking awesome for internal communication. As soon as people actually start using it.
"That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months, forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface."
So, basically, let's eliminate the form of electronic communication that has some semblance of permanency (e-mail) and replace it with an ephemeral one (Facebook-style chat) and one that doesn't lend well to archiving, indexing and search (IM).
E-mail is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used wisely, or it can be used poorly. If it's being used poorly, why isn't the solution to fix how people are using it? And how the heck is 18% of the e-mail that reaches users spam? Do they not use filters?
Why would it be hard to archive and index chats or IMs? My Facebook chats and IMs are already archived on Facebook. I even have a local archive in my iChat folder. Seems like that problem has been solved.
The article just means his company is shifting to something like Jive instead of Exchange.
Maintaining an internal mail system is a gigantic headache for many reasons. You have continual spam and phishing attacks from the outside as well as internal users using their email as a document repository. Closing off the external threat and using purpose built software for document exchange and internal communication is totally sensible.
Archive use of third party services like AIM or something is technically challenging for a variety of reasons, particularly as the industry continues its slow but steady march towards SSL usage. Products exist which can penetrate this encryption and log the network traffic directly (when I say "challenging" I mean just that, not impossible), translating it into logged IM entries (and yes, they do it by obtaining the keys from the services in question), but they are awfully pricy compared to just declaring that IM shall not be used, and there are enough protocols out there with enough usage that there's some frequent pain around losing logging with protocol updates. You can also host an IM server internally in which case logging is trivial, but many people aren't even aware that this is an option, or don't want to deal with IT to set it up and maintain it, or don't want to purchase the off-the-shelf products which can do it but are also more expensive (virtually by definition) than just declaring it shall not be done.
I used to work in this field. I do not recommend trying to break into it, there does not appear to be a market here.
I didn't mean the first thing you mentioned, more like the second. Mostly I meant that you can already buy enterprise social networking suites complete with instant messaging. My post must have been worded badly as it seems to have confused people. My comments about Facebook and IM were in response to a post that suggested there was some technical difficulty in archiving and searching IM and social networking style posts. Obviously, there is not, because Facebook already does it, and similar capability exists within iChat itself! It would not be difficult for a vendor to provide an integrated social network with IM to enterprises, and indeed, there are vendors which do just this.
I disagree that there is no market for this. Jive's S1 says they have 15M enterprise users spread out over 600+ companies.
There are all kinds of risks in letting Facebook handle the archiving of a company's internal communication, their bad track record with matters of data privacy notwithstanding.
I meant that a searchable Facebook style interface for archiving corporate communications isn't impossible, and already exists from at least one vendor. Not that a company should outsource their communication to Facebook.
If something needs to be permanent, you should create a real document and publish it to a shared repository. That way knowledge, history and commentary is kept in a single place and not distributed throughout everyone's inboxes.
"Should" is the keyword here. Not that I disagree with you, but nobody is actually going to do this. Ever. Email is too easy to be replaced by document-creation procedures.
Also, email is great for showing record of communication. It's subject-based (except for the idiots who reply to an email with contents that have nothing to do with the subject) so it can be easily categorized and remembered. "Where was that email Rick sent? Oh yeah it was around the beginning of Nov, and the subject had 'wombats' in it." Sometimes you need a subject-based list of records.
I really think anything people end up "inventing" to replace email will wind up being the exact same thing as email, but with a less distributed architecture.
Sounds like that's a problem that could be fixed quite simply. Find out why HR is sending out so much stuff, and if there's a better way to do it or a way to eliminate it altogether. A short, once-a-day announcements e-mail should suffice, no?
This is probably because the existence of their department is not entirely justifiable and they feel the need to make others aware of their presence and create the appearance of work being done.
Tools. Exactly! That's the real issue that's at the heart of this. I'm no insider so I could be way off but I'm seeing either a company making a brash move sincerely but stupidly or there was some guy within the organization that thought this idea was so different that if implemented they could be considered cool and trendy like the younger startups and get some media attention from it.
Again, this is just my wild speculation but I got this funny feeling that this move was a chance for them to kill two birds with one stone. Solve a problem with a radical new solution while getting attention for it. I really don't think the media jumps all over company communication policies unless someone is spoon feeding them the story. I can just imagine some marketing guy writing a press released entitled "Hip Twch Firm Abandons Email, Paves the way for the Future of Communication".
Let's hope they are collaborating with some real researches to measure the impact of this. It's definitely a super interesting and plausible experiment.
I have a love/hate relationship with email. It's definitely good in theory, but in reality there are hundreds of problems with it.
One example: I get hundreds of CC'd emails a day ( I'm CEO ) and people assume that I read them and memorize them.
Sure, it's a super low overhead way for other people to update me on all sorts of progress. However, I don't need that kind of visibility. I train people to make decisions autonomously and give me weekly updates. I can do that because I'm everyone's boss and I'm still drowning under the flood of well meaning CCs. I'm sure it's worse for most.
"Ban" is probably not the right action, but I'd definitely like some action taken around my office.
I've proposed some form of email tax by recipient. Like, you get 100 recipients per day free or something. Slow down and use them well. The time you try to save by being vague and sending out garbage is time that all your recipients spend trying to figure out what you want from them and whether it's more important than whatever else they're doing.
I see lots of emails floating around where I have to respond, "Please file a bug and move the conversation there before all of this is lost." Then you get the, "I just got a new cat!" email sent to all with hundreds of, "yay!" responses. I'm glad you got a new cat. I'd be happy to "like" your post on yammer. I'm not happy to get an email every time someone else wants to congratulate you on your cat acquisition.
I build up a lot of email debt and every once in a while I manage to get rid of some things. Part of it is tooling (I'd like a sort of "shelf life" for email in my mail reader), but part of it is just how easy it is for humans to do the one thing that amplifies into a time sink for everyone else.
I agree that email is a tool and that the way it's used is most of the battle. But I feel, more and more these days, that email is a heavy chain around my neck throughout the day.
Actually, email is really only a delivery method, just as facebook message or skype IM is just a delivery method. I think the solution to this problem is what the client does on receiving that message (or probably what my mail server does).
If my boss sends me a job he wants doing, then that message should go into a to-do bucket, with a due date and reminders. If that message is telling me that a domain name was auto-renewed for £x, it should ping my online accounts software and reconcile it with the bank transaction.
Doing this would eliminate the need for me to have an inbox, all of these things would go somewhere useful and actionable.
Stopping emails will not stop people sending me blocks of text that I need to read and process.
The biggest problem with email is how much information is in private emails instead of public forums. If I want to learn something internal to my company, I have to spend days investigating who to ask, then go to a bunch of conference calls or meetings, only to receive a 700-forwards-deep piece of documentation from someone who was laid off decades ago. In the real world, I type my question into Google and have an answer in seconds.
The problem is that most people at big companies suck massively at communication, and that that lack of skill wastes thousands of hours of valuable programmer time. The only way I can have a really productive day at work is to stay home, keep my email closed, and not work on systems that depend on any shared infrastructure. No wonder our market cap is less than our assets :)
My company has great spam filters. Our problem is the chatter, reply-to-all, and +{some list with 300 people} behaviors.
Two months ago, I implemented the nuclear rule on my inbox.
- if my email is not in to or cc
- if the mail isn't sent to whitelisted lists
- if body doesn't contain certAin keywords
-> the mail is stored in a "not sent to me" folder which I check less and less frequently. Merlin Mann definitely inspired this experiment.
It's been working great. I've been more productive and have missed very little.
If they only want to have employees contact each other, why not restrict the email to internal use only? Have the server block any email not sent by another employee or being sent to a non-employee. Removing it altogether and requiring communication by IM does not scale - can you imagine going on vacation and coming back to hundreds of IMs?
A very large percentage of my day is spent reading emails from other employees in my company to figure out if there's anything I should be doing with it.
If I'm on vacation, I'm not online to receive an IM. Anything important that needs work from me would have instead been filed as a bug and can be assigned to me on my return if it hasn't been fixed yet.
My younger (and very productive) co-worker has his IM client running by default and uses it to communicate with other (young) co-workers. Frankly, I don't know how they do it. I would go mad - the constant notification popups in the upper right corner kill my concentration. They're too distracting for me. But then again, I'm probably just getting old.
A former co-worker at a different company had a policy that he would only read/write email before noon each day. I think something like that may be a better strategy than discarding email altogether company-wide. When you need an answer right away, you could always use the phone. And for him at least this did not result in people dropping by his office or his phone ringing all the time.
There is also a risk that people start working around the policy by using webmail such like gmail in order to patch the communication problem. Which could make the problem even worst.
If you have a look back at how long the death of email has been predicted you can go about as far back as the first email service created. Not everyone adopted it.
If you want to go back to 2005 you might like the point of view of Stowe Boyd http://sto.ly/uCnRMs regarding this article. Also, I've been on talks/panels on the topic as far back as 2009 http://bit.ly/9ENcpJ and again in 2010 http://bit.ly/bG7DVz complete with a sad rendering of an inline Google Wave.
How do I feel now about email? Mixed.
What I do agree with is the notion of email as a lowest common denominator for exchanging information has a lasting value. What I do not agree with is that email is /enough/ for everyone.
Today, you have lots of choices in how you use email or elect to treat it (or ignore it) so that only the most relevant things are presented to you. If you are a company/corporation and you are planning to allow for employee communication the effectiveness of any solution is far removed from just email these days. If anything, we're generating more silos now than we ever have.
To the other comments here regarding Salesforce/Chatter, groupware, etc... I get that -- in fact I use that -- but there are still TONS [2] of people that steadfastly maintain that email is the only thing that lets them use their iPhone or Crackberry without jumping through the hoops of corporate VPNs or other hoop jumping exercises to reach a web groupware app that just fundamentally FAILED to ever take into consideration the mobile experience.
I'm surprised at the lack of comments about Yammer. I used to think it would be a product I'd NEVER use, but for a recent year long project I used it with a team of around 20 others. The result was pretty awesome. Emails were rarely sent/received, at least internally, and this was not a policy (the use of Yammer over email just naturally happened). When email WAS appropriate (private discussions usually, or outside partners), it was of course used, but this was only around 10% of the time. Everything else was in Yammer, Campfire, or IM, and it was SO much better.
My favorite aspect of this was the ability to include someones username in a post (much like on Facebook, via @username). This would actually ping them to let them know their attention was required, otherwise you can keep up to date with Yammer threads at your own pace. This is not the case with email.
We have yammer at work. It's a total waste of a time sink.
Maybe I'm just old, but I much, much, much prefer stored systems like email which I can ignore when I need, keeps nice queue of what I've received/read, has folders/filtering/taging/search, ability to archive/save important messages.
Vs IM/Twitter/IRC constant stream systems. Which constantly distract me with msgs I care little about and when I ignore them it's easy to miss and hard to discover I missed something important.
Instant messaging is NOT a good substitute for email, because it requires that everyone be simultaneously available over an always-on Internet connection. Email in contrast enables asynchronous communication over unreliable Internet connections.
Wiki-style or Facebook-style application might SEEM better alternatives to email, but as soon as most people in the company start using these applications instead of email, guess what? All those superfluous, time-wasting messages that were clogging up the email system will start clogging up the new applications. It's human nature.
A much better approach IMO would be to transition away from old-fashioned corporate email applications like OutLook/Exchange to newer ones (like Gmail) that make employees more productive/efficient.
Here's my test of whether a message should be sent via email: "Can I reply to it?" If the answer is no then it probably shouldn't be in email. Think about all of the do-not-reply@ messages that come in that are notifying you of something happening in some other system. email is for communication but too often is just used for broadcasting one way messages. If I had an easy way of filtering out these messages I could easily reduce my inbox by 90% - down to things sent by humans that I need to respond to. Everything else could go into some notification feed, the problem is that there's no standard protocol for that so everything ends up in your inbox.
How silly. Employees will continue using e-mail to communicate with each other, except now they're going to use personal Gmail / Hotmail / Yahoo accounts to do it.
While idiotic, his points have some merit. I'm known to crucify people that cc/bcc me as part of their "cover your ass" cc/bcc corporate email chains. I also found out early in life that 1 phone call can replace 10 email exchanges between two parties.
Whatever the fallout, it will make for an interesting experiment. Personally I think most of the staff will rely on personal email addresses :)
A good part of that is episodic and accidental. There have been instances of those "spammy" internal mails that just can't give up, such as a mail sent by the HR to inform people that a car was left with lights on in the morning with everyone (and not just the building) in cc instead of bcc or a contact group, with endless streams of "reply all" asking to remove them from the mailing list.
These happen, and in very large companies these issues can degenerate fast unless your email admins are on their toes. Repeat the incident once a year and it's fine. Repeat it once a month and you have a failing email system with very visible streaks of 200+ mails/day.
This is one of those ideas that sounds good at first but I think they may rethink that.
Their points on the disadvantages of email are true and good but they may be overlooking its good points and the downsides to using IM.
Spam can be quickly deleted. While its an annoyance there are Ways to curb the amount received.
Lots of not useful email is sent but there are lots that are useful.
The cool thing about email is that you can choose to ignore it easily and come back later. When you substitute IM for email you're opening a can of worms that can be worse. An IM is harder to ignore, people expect an instant response and people will still use it for communicating less than useful info still.
When you have an IM client open all the time you're going to have to context switch more often than with email. With email you may get a little alert via something like the Mail.app sound for new mail or a Growl type notification but you know it can wait. With IM you're going to be switching over immediately. Context switching kills productivity and this policy will make matters worse.
The better solution would to implement a policy that stops people from sending ridiculously not useful emails. They aren't solving the problem but just putting it into a new context.
But then I'm reminded of a story here on HN from a day ago from the Atlantic that talks about how folks like us can easily criticize but if we're so smart why aren't we running that company. It may not apply here but it just popped into my head.
What immediately struck me is having two forms of communication rather than one. I don't like that. The article mentions the company reduced it's email by some percentage in the last six months as if that means something. I know I'm more likely to send a stupid link to a coworker if I'm on chat vs company email.
Yep, you're exactly right. It's like replacing long form time wasters with short form time wasters. A context switch is a context switch whether it's from productive work to email or from productive work to IM.
Their problems seem to be people-related, not technology related. Most messages I receive on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Yammer, IRC, and any other form of digital communication just aren't important. Email really isn't an exception here in my experience.
To put this in the best possible light, consider a rogue manager of a publicly traded company, who is discovered by the company and subsequently fired. If he does something bad with a legally-mandated paper trail, we're talking about discoverable material that would show up in any serious lawsuit about an unrelated matter. If we're talking about a crazy internal system that deliberately never logged anything in the first place, the company is open to much less legal liability.