Overview
Love it, hate it, or both, email is the dominant form of electronic communication. Eighty-five billion emails were sent every day worldwide in 2006. It’s impossible to imagine life without it.
But is email right for every style of communication we conduct in business? Should it be the biggest game in town? How heavily should your business rely on it? Is there a better alternative? Email does have a few things going for it. Everyone has email, and it often beats the time and trouble of a face-to-face visit or picking up the phone. You can fire a message off in a few seconds, and you can ignore your in-box if you like. But, if email is the epitome of efficient business communication, or the best we can ever expect, why are we investing so much energy in next-generation media like instant messaging, web conferencing and video conferencing? Why are organizations increasingly looking at wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 phenomena to improve their communication effectiveness? And why do we still have phones on our desks?
As businesses rely more and more on cross-functional teamwork to accomplish their goals, we believe they rely much too heavily on email. They need to be thinking beyond the in-box. Although we still need email, it should be a proportional part of a broader, diverse menu of communication modes from which individuals can choose based on their immediate circumstance and the business objective at hand. This paper explores this premise.
Email’s limits
If email is the cure for inefficient communication, it’s sometimes worse than the disease. One executive got so sick of wading through email that he banned his entire department from using it on Fridays, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article. Another executive in the story was reduced to creating a “limbo” folder in his email box. Like so many forgotten souls, hundreds of messages have languished there, some from 2003.
Too much email is junk. Too much important email is obfuscated by vague, ambiguous or incorrect subject lines. Too many messages look urgent until you find out you’re just one of a crowd on the cc list. Conversely, too many emails leave key people out. Or they go to the wrong person entirely and need to be forwarded (Fw: fw: fw: fw:…) until they get to the right one. And unless you’re a true power user who has programmed custom rules into your mail server (and chances are you aren’t), email is organized by message recency – last one in goes to the top of the pile. All of these factors make email a suboptimal choice for group conversation.
As many as 40 percent of email messages are irrelevant to users’ jobs, estimates the Gartner Inc. research firm, and the average user’s in-box management time will soar from an average of 90 minutes per day to two hours by 2009.
As one of the executives in the Journal article says, “We’ve reached the too-much information age, but we really haven’t reached the communication age.” There must be a better way.
Is instant messaging the answer?
For an increasing number of people in a growing number of situations, instant messaging is supplanting email as the communications medium of choice. Somewhere around 12 billion instant messages are sent each day. IM’s usage in business is growing as well. In 2005, more than 28 million business users worldwide were using enterprise instant messaging (EIM) products to send nearly one billion messages each day, according to IDC. The EIM applications market is expected to more than double between 2005 and 2009 to $736 million. An IM bias among younger people foreshadows even more usage in decades to come. Twice as many teens use instant messaging as adults.
“In the next few years, IDC expects instant messaging – once the plaything of teenagers – to continue to grow into its role as a substantial business collaboration application,” says Robert P. Mahowald, program director for IDC’s collaborative computing research.
Not surprisingly, instant messaging is attracting significant investment by the tech giants. IM is a key piece of Microsoft’s “unified communications” strategy, which the company says “will break down today’s silos of email, instant messaging, mobile and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) telephony, and audio-, video- and web conferencing.”
