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 😛