Ending Email
I was all cranked up to rant against the swelling tide of email. “How long, oh lord, how long must we put up with this evil scourge?” and so on. I was only away from my desk for two working days over Christmas yet it took most of a morning to get my inbox back under control, and that with half the team also out for the holidays. People have been advising, predicting, working and praying for the demise of email for years yet it’s still (according to Pew Research) the dominant communication platform for business. And if the overall proportion is slipping, it’s only because other media are growing faster, not because there’s any less of it. But when I lifted my eyes from the screen that first January morning, scarfed another leftover Christmas cookie (gotta deal with the stress, you understand), I started to wonder if the situation hasn’t begun to right itself. I’m not saying that light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a train; but maybe we don’t have to be down here following these tracks in the first place.
I don’t need to convince anyone that we all get too much email (if you get few enough messages that you can digest and respond to them the same day without disrupting any of your “real work” then this article isn’t for you – click on, my friend, click on), or that most of it is irrelevant to the work in front of us. Most of the email I get in a day falls into the class of “someone else did something and they want me to know about it for some reason” as opposed to assignments or questions that I need to respond to. The bug tracking system, the help desk ticket management system, the SharePoint site, they’re all sending me little love notes; then there are the marketers who make it past the spam filters to tell me about their new release of a product someone in another industry might use, or the course I can take to prepare me for a certification I already have. The message from the colleague in the next cubicle comes as a blessed relief, even though he could have just asked the question without raising his voice in considerably less time than it took him to tap out the email – but he had to cc our boss so that she’d know we’re doing work.
It’s not just a matter of dealing with the sheer volume in order to retrieve precious productivity. Teasing the data you need out of the mass of unstructured messages in your inbox takes time, but worse, that data is disconnected. The messages have been disassociated from their context and contain little that would allow them to be linked to the processes and workflows they support. Email obscures an organization’s collective knowledge, and because we’ve invested so much in data that’s so hard to use it stands in the way of innovation. We can’t afford to throw it away, but we can’t easily recover it and put it where it would be useful in a more connected and integrated system. We need to stop throwing more and more what I’ll call – even though much of it is often nearly devoid of substance – information into an unstructured heap. Keyword searches help, but even Google-like tools are challenged when most of your workplace messages are so similar. Instead we need to communicate in ways that efficiently direct, contextualize and preserve the data.
Long before email became ubiquitous we were devising database after database for a wealth of business problems. So if information was saved in the customer relationship management system, it was then only available in the CRM and not in the requirements management system or the Help Desk’s knowledgebase. Your data may then have been preserved in context, but it couldn’t be efficiently communicated or re-purposed outside the system. We’ve come a long way towards sharing data across systems and platforms with enabling technologies like server virtualization, mass storage, and XML among countless others. These allow us to create flexible and extensible systems, in some ways the antithesis of email. Whereas they capture and route certain kinds of data in specific ways, email gathers up just about everything (up to certain practical size limits) and sends it to anyone. Deciding when to send an email and when to update the database entails compromise, but we’re always going to need a little of both. I’m sympathetic to the CEO who decided to ban email across his global company; but I doubt his experiment was a success.
Help is not just on the way, though, it’s already here. While Gartner seems to like the term “Enterprise Social Network” I find it a little bit of old wine in new bottles. Many of the concepts have been there for years, but are being given a Facebook or Twitter gloss to appeal to the young ‘uns. That quibble aside, the clever use of well-designed and properly used collaboration tools – the general term I prefer – means we don’t have to compromise (or not as much). We can naturally record contextualizing metadata with our information, move it through specific workflows and constrain its exposure without necessarily losing the generality of email.
Tools like SharePoint and Google Docs could be components of a solution, although I want to stress the “well-designed” part. As always, tools don’t in themselves make a useful system. Even (or perhaps especially) something as sophisticated as Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server requires thoughtful design, configuration and user training to before you have a system that preserves, displays, manipulates and makes discoverable your organization’s valuable data. Other tools I’ve heard about lately include Axero, which calls itself by the ESN tag and promises productivity gains of 25-30%, and Slack, with which The Guardian seems very impressed. I haven’t seen either up close, but Slack in particular seems to tip away from the managed workflow of a TFS towards a more flexible multi-platform team room tools approach.
Maybe one of these tools is right for you; or maybe you can continue to build out your SharePoint site. Regardless, there are more and more ways to integrate communications into the actual business process without having to glue it together with email (or worse, cut and paste data from email messages or attachments). These things are no longer new and are becoming increasingly taken for granted. You probably haven’t even noticed but I’ll bet the percentage of your emails that contain actual business data is reduced and the proportion of messages that are about HR’s latest policy, shareholder press releases and donuts in the coffee room is rising.
While the sheer volume of email may not be dropping, its relevance to your work is. The day is coming where office email gets as much attention as snail mail does now: something you can scan through and discard every day or three but that’s unlikely to contain anything important. Of course by then, we’ll probably be overwhelmed by the messaging in the collaboration tools, which come to think of it, I am already. No silver lining without a dark grey cloud.
