We’re contributing to an event with that title on the afternoon of 1st July. Let me explain the backdrop and then what it’s all about.
Business has been tied to collaborating with email and sharing files by attaching them to those message since the 80s (and actually the first ever email was sent in 1971!). So we’ve been working this way for maybe 40 years. Then back in the 90s as the Internet took hold it became a cool communication mechansim for consumers too – the movie “You’ve Got Mail” was in 1998, a time when, if we weren’t on the office network, we all got used to the buzzing of a modem to connect. Coming in to the 21st Century, as broadband and wider connectivity took hold, you would think we would be finding better ways. You would think we would get beyond sending a spreadsheet to 3 people by email and suddenly there are 4 copies of the file trapped in 4 inboxes and who has the latest version? We’re crazy, because even today many of us still collaborate that way.
Part of the reason we still do it is because of Riepl’s Law. Alan blogged about that a short while ago telling us that:
“newer and further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place”
But things did change coming in to this century. The world of social tools emerged. As consumers first, and then in more progressive businesses, we started to use a different form of communication – blogs, wikis, microblogging, instant messaging in a variety of forms, video calls, online meetings and hangouts. However, although these tools delivered great value in certain use cases, and some companies deployed enterprise social networks and succesful social business initiatives, they just haven’t achieved the promise we originally expected. Consumer social tools like Twitter and Facebook have become part of the fabric of communications for business and as well as in our personal lives, but that adds to the problem, where our conversations and interactions get fragmented across many channels that don’t fit well together.
Back in February 2008 one of our good friends, Luis Suárez, took a stand against email when he was in IBM. He has been famouus for living “A World Without Email” ever since. Take a look at this video of him explaining how he operates from the 2011 campaign:
Since 2011 there has even been a No Email Day each year. Follow the hashtag #noemail to see the current activity. Other companies have embraced the idea, like our friends at Atos/BlueKiwi. All of these initiatives are great, but there has to be a better way.
That “better way” is exactly the topic of the event we are supporting with BroadVision titled “Business Communication is (Still) Broken” at the British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace in London on July 1st starting at 15:00 and finishing at 17:00. BroadVision is an international software vendor of self-service web applications for enterprise social software, electronic commerce, Enterprise Portals, and CRM. We are delighted that their founder, chairman and CEO, Dr Pehong Chen, is over from the USA to be the main speaker. After the welcome and introductions, I’ll be spending 5 minutes setting the scene and then acting as master of ceremonies for the event. The rest of the agenda will be:
- Dr Pehong Chen talking about new ways of collaborative working, both at the desk or on the move with mobile devices, as well as about BroadVision’s Vmoso technology.
- One of the Agile Elephant co-founders, Alan Patrick, will talk about Social Business in terms of where companies have succeed, where they’ve failed and why, and the he’ll explore what needs to be done.
- Richard Hughes, BroadVision’s Director of Social Strategy, will highlight the ways many of our existing communication tools are making us inefficient and, more importantly, what we should do to fix this.
- All of the speakers will join in a question and answer panel session.
This is a great line up, and promises to trigger some great discussion around a vital issue. If you would like a place, follow this link to contact BroadVision
And on top of that, if you are coming to the British Academy on the afternoon of July 1st, we’ve arranged our regular “first Wednesday of the month” evening Social Business Sessions London meetup at the same venue with the kind support of BroadVision, and Pehong is staying on to be our main speaker. More details here.
UPDATE: A great long comment on #noemail just added by Luis in response. And I’ve posted about the related evening meetup too.
Hi David, many thanks for the kind mention and for the link love. Sounds like you will all be having a real blast at the event with quite a line-up! Wish I were a fly on those walls of a stunning venue as well! Hope you have a blast and get an important conversation going.
Yes, email is, essentially, pretty much broken. As a communication tool, it may well still serve a purpose or two, just like the telegram or the fax machine, but as a collaboration tool it’s rather poor, cumbersome and perhaps even frustrating, for the same reasons you mentioned above, as well as many many others. In a complex environment where most knowledge workers work in multiple project teams, across geographies, mostly distributed, with different reporting lines, it’s becoming more complex that good old task of ‘collaboration’: getting work done, together.
There are better communication AND collaboration tools out there, indeed, in the thousands, if not more!, but the challenges themselves still remain. Mostly, our very own behaviours and mindset. We have become masters of killing each other’s productivity and when a tool manages to do that very effectively in a rather easy manner, we *do* have a problem. That’s why in 2008 I started the #noemail movement, more than anything else prove that there are alternatives, i.e. lots of them, to improve the way we share and collaborate with our knowledge and expertise, and, yet, we are not doing it, because we feel it’s much ‘easier’ to do our work via email. Wrong, I am afraid.
Fragmentation is good, actually. It allows you to define context and let the context itself of the interaction define on its own what’s the best option out there and stick around with it. Some times, it will be sharing a file, a blog post, a wiki page update, a micromessage, etc. etc. What matters is that’s done out there in the open for everyone else to enjoy and benefit from, and right now that’s not happening perhaps at the level most folks would have anticipated. For me, it is happening. It’s already happened! Yes, I haven’t been able to kill email just yet, but I have reduced it to the point where it’s no longer an issue for me (Currently receiving 6 emails per week, which is not too shabby), while the vast majority of interactions have moved into social, digital tools. It can be done. It’s just a matter of a bit of patience, resilience, a specific methodology and to get started.
I think it would be rather interesting if, during the event, there would be a conversation as to why can’t / won’t have any improvements around one key area that still gets email to reign over everything else: pervasiveness. I mean, why aren’t those business communication and collaboration tools talking to one another, in a federated manner, so that no matter what you do, your message would get across pretty much anywhere, like we have got with email. The W3C has been working on these open social standards for a good few years, yet, progress has been rather poor. And I am starting to wonder whether all of those major email vendors have got a game to play in here, as it keeps sustaining the cash flows. I know that’s not happening, but it makes one wonder some times!
Simply put, I just can’t expect for us to change the nature of work, never mind its own future, having to rely on a technology that’s older than me. Really sorry, but we, collectively, need to do better. MUCH better. That’s why I stopped using email. That’s why I decided to break the chain and fully embraced digital tools to collaborate and share knowledge. And so far the results have been amazing, not only while I was at IBM, but also now that I am an independent and the #noemail movement is picking up more and more momentum… Time for the world to start playing catch up with 2008, perhaps? 😉
Hope you folks have a wonderful event and look forward to catching up with the twitter live stream, ironically, something I wouldn’t be able to do via email 😛