Thierry Breton, Atos CEO, Harvard Business School professor, and France's former economic minister, raised eyebrows around the world when he said his company would ban email for internal communications within the next year and a half. The plan is to replace email with an enterprise social networking platform, which would handle all communications among Atos' 70,000 employees worldwide. Melanie Turek and her colleagues have already discussed this news and found Atos’ strategy lacking. I threw out a few tweets criticizing the move as impractical given the central role email plays in business communications these days. But now I'd like to weigh in with a counter argument of sorts, because after attending IBM's Lotusphere conference last month, I’m beginning to grasp how enterprise social networking software can--if not completely replace existing forms of communications within the workplace--at least clean up the morass that corporate messaging has become in recent years.
First, a bit more about Atos. Part of the problem of providing an informed commentary on the company's project is that we don't know what social networking platform it plans to implement as an alternative to internal email. At first I figured it would be something bought from Jive, Igloo, Acquia, Telligent, IBM, Cisco, or one of the other "Facebook for the enterprise" software developers. But these names never come up in the articles, at least not in the ones I've read. Instead, it seems Atos is writing its own customized app for social. That in itself is interesting, as it implies that the company finds existing enterprise social networking software packages somehow inadequate for its needs.
I can't say that I'm really onboard with Atos's rationale for retiring email. Breton claims that 90% of messages waste employees' time. Granted, any task that wastes time nine times out of ten is a problem that needs to be fixed. I'm not sure where this number comes from or the precise type of emails that Breton has stuck in his craw, but I bet he paid a pretty penny for some fancy-schmancy study about office worker productivity that backs it up. I suppose there's some kind of logic in it, especially if the plan is to eliminate non-work related emails coming from outside the company. And if Atos' social networking platform does away with long, disjointed message threads whose topic changes from beginning to end and contains various side conversations, there would certainly be productivity gains to be had with that as well.
However, I'm of the opinion that email doesn't waste time, so much as people waste time. They waste time by obsessively following message threads that are not relevant to them. By replying to all when not everyone needs to be looped in or replying just to the sender when everyone on the thread should receive the alert. By spending their workday sifting through personal email, which Atos employees will just get on their smart phones if external email is suddenly made unavailable to them. These are problems stemming back to work ethics and end user training. If they are an issue with workers' use of email they will remain an issue with enterprise social networking usage as well.
In my opinion, eliminating email is not the solution. How many workers after all never need to send an email to someone--a customer, a prospect, a supplier, a business partner--outside their company? How many never need to access external websites that require them to register with an email account? Precious few, I warrant. So email will still be necessary for external communications even for a goodly portion of folks at Atos. How is IT to accomplish this? Make separate email and enterprise social networking clients available to each end user, who will need to toggle from one to the other depending on whether he or she is communicating with someone inside or outside Atos? This doesn't seem like something that fosters increased productivity. Which brings me to Lotusphere.
The conference was all social this and social that...not surprising given IBM's wholehearted embrace of social networking as the defining quality of its collaboration and communications software strategy. In one of the keynotes, social software VP Jeff Schick teased the audience with some details about "Connections Next," the refreshingly straightforward name for the next version of IBM's enterprise social networking software. Connections Next, as Eric noted in his blog, will be able to display Notes (and Microsoft Exchange) email messages via a dropdown menu within the activity stream. This builds on existing integration that allows Connections activities, blogs, bookmarks, and so forth to appear within the Notes client. And an upcoming "social edition" of Notes and Domino will include "embedded experiences" that bring the Connections activity screen front and center in the Notes home page, rather than having it comparatively buried behind a set of drop down menus. Other apps (not just Connections) will be able to be embedded into the new Notes user interface. And iNotes, the web version of Lotus Notes, will also support embedded apps--Connections or otherwise.
Screen shot of Lotus Notes Social Edition. Connections activity stream appears in the same UI where corporate email is accessed.
This will not necessarily be less of a burden for IT, which will still need to support separate email and enterprise social networking apps, assuming both options are made available to end users. Nor will it be much of a relief to CIOs, who will need to pay for both apps. But it could greatly help end users finding unfamiliar collaboration technology foisted upon them. "A lot of people are comfortable of living in their email environments," IBM's Alistair Rennie said, clearly referring to my generation for which email has been the preferred means of both casual and formal text-based business communications for their entire careers. Allowing me to access social networking and other applications from within my email interface is likely to raise my comfort level in using new forms of collaboration apps. Likewise, embedding email within social networking applications like Connections will help facilitate its usage by younger employees for whom email is as passé a way of communicating as fax.
I'd like to be convinced that enterprise social networking is a phenomenon, not just a fad. But I'm not and won't be until we see widespread adoption, not just the odd case study. I am convinced, though, that messaging desperately needs to change. The emergence of texting, instant messaging, microblogging, activity streams, discussion forums, and other text-based forms of corporate communications is evidence that workers are seeking--and readily finding--alternatives to tried and true, yet misused and overused corporate email. A new generation of unified messaging applications is needed to make them all available from a common set of user interfaces, and hopefully with a common back end and management framework. It is likely to be a long, messy transition away from email. But the morass that corporate messaging is in today cannot continue indefinitely.
And speaking of social networking...don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!
