Ever heard the expression: “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail?” Yes, I’m talking about e-mail. According to the recent book, “The Tyranny of E-mail” by John Freeman, we’re now spending more than 40% of our time in corporate America “working” e-mail (note the quotes around the word working). It’s not just you; it’s your entire staff, your entire company. The problem with e-mail is that it’s other people’s agenda, not your priorities.
Worse than that, with the explosion of spam and use of “Reply All”, information density is actually declining. Am I the only one who thinks we should have the death penalty for long e-mails? This tool is totally out of control.
Gen Y rarely, if ever, uses e-mail. Why? With their fresh eyes, they’ve found social media tools that are more efficient and more effective for communicating. When they want to convey time-critical information, they send texts. Otherwise, they use a rich information-sharing tool called Facebook. While these tools are great for personal communication, what if we could use similar mechanisms for corporate communication? Interesting… no?
Companies that have adopted such approaches are seeing (on average) a 30% reduction in e-mail AND achieving 52% faster access to information. Think about it. That amounts to one hour per day, per employee, for every person in your company.
For sharing time critical information, 
use Yammer or Chatter. With these texting-based services, there’s a big difference compared to e-mail: It’s not just that messages arrive instantly even without Internet connectivity. And it’s not just that messages are concise, such that you can read and respond in less than a minute. Instead, these new tools put conversations into the cloud.
Information is no longer lost, fragmented across people’s PCs as with e-mail. Instead, it becomes part of a corporate knowledge base, searchable on demand, today or years from now. Further, it’s no longer the content producers decide who consumes information via “To”, “CC” and “BCC”. Instead, content consumers decide whom to follow. That’s a game-changing idea.
Next, complement such texting-based services with one of the world’s best knowledge management systems. I’m talking about the software that powers Wikipedia – or rather a dedicated version that lives on your servers, inside your firewall. It’s available free from Tiki.org.
Imagine a knowledge base, not of all human knowledge, but of all corporate knowledge, that’s searchable and traceable such that employees know who added what… when.
Think about the implications of making it culturally illegal in your company to send documents via e-mail. Instead post your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files (Mac fans: think Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) to your Twiki and have employees edit them in place.
When employees leave, you won’t lose the corporate knowledge in their e-mail archives. When employees join, you can direct them to the relevant pages of your Twiki and they’ll on-board themselves.
Like telegrams, pagers, and fax machines, e-mail is now past its prime. It’s time to equip your organization with the latest tools… before your competitors do.