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How to Break the Tyranny of E-mail

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"Identifying where email is being overused and abused is a good indicator as to where collaboration tools will be valuable"

- Nikos Drakos, Research Director at Gartner

E-mail is the digital nervous system of most enterprises today. Without email, they would more or less stop ticking. The reason is simple: rapid access to information is crucial in today’s world, and e-mail is the main mechanism in an enterprise to make that information flow.

So how did this happen? Well, e-mail has many strengths and benefits that make it very fit for information-sharing, such as:

• It is a very rapid way of sharing of information
• It can be accessed from anywhere, using any device
• It is easy and convenient to use
• It is easy to target specific receivers

In addition, e-mail is a very versatile communication tool and can be used for virtually any kind of communication. It is especially suited for one-way one-to-many communication and private two-way conversations.

Still, e-mail is often accused of causing many problems, such as:

• Information sent via e-mail is duplicated for each recipient and thus consumes a lot of  unnecessary storage and causes versioning problems
• Information that can be valuable for other people is locked into individual inboxes and can’t be either found or accessed
• Collaboration and many-to-many communication via e-mail easily gets messy
• There is no way to opt out from a conversation (the sender chooses whom to include as recipients) which contributes to the feeling of information overload

This list could just go on and on…

Consequently, there has, and rightfully so, been much talk recent years about the need to provide users with alternative tools that are better at the things that e-mail is not very good at. Currently we put most of our hopes to social software (wikis, blogs, micro-blogs, RSS, social bookmarking…). The promise is that they will break the tyranny of email.

But wait a minute…if we just study email a little bit closer, we'll find that email in fact has many of the traits that we assign to social software:

• It is easy to use - anyone who can write and click on a button or two can use it
• It is freeform - you can write whatever you want, short or long, structured or unstructured. If you can’t add what you want to share in the body of the e-mail, then you can simply attach it as a file.
• It is unequal of position - you might see a person’s position in the signature, but as it is located in the end of an e-mail it is not given much significance. This makes the barrier to contact someone via e-mail low.
• It focuses on people-to-people interaction and dialog, encouraging conversations of personal nature.
• It is easily available - anyone has can get and set up an email account for free.
• It is easy to access – email can be accessed from any virtually device (25% of UK mobile users check or send emails on their phones on a regular basis according to Synovate)
• It has global reach - an email can reach anyone in the world, at any time, within seconds as long as they just have an email address. And many do. (there are 1.4 billion email users worldwide according to royal.pingdom.com)

If e-mail would have been introduced as a new tool today, I am pretty sure that it would have been categorized as social software.

Looking at email this way, it becomes pretty obvious that the main problem with e-mail probably is how we use it. This is probably to do with its traits: it is simply too easy to use, too versatile, too accessible, and too freeform compared to other alternatives. Since people often look for the most convenient solution at hand, these things make it quite rational for us to choose e-mail over any other alternative in almost all situations. If we now would find a tool that is even better than e-mail in these respects, then we can be pretty sure that we will overuse and misuse that tool too.

So, what should we do to resolve the problems caused by overuse and misuse of e-mail? How do we break the tyranny of e-mail (use)? Here is how:

1. We need to ensure that we have a palette of tools and platforms from which we can choose the one(s) that allows us to effectively fulfill our purpose in each situation. Each of these tools and platforms needs to be – more or less - equivalent to e-mail when it comes to ease of use, ease of access, and so forth.
2. More importantly, we need to stop blaming the tools and instead look closer at and change our own behaviors as individuals. We all need to become more skilled at how to communicate effectively, knowing exactly what tool to use for what purpose, in what situation, and how. Even though early adopters of new communication technologies might learn how to use these by themselves, most users will require guidance and training.  

"If you don't train users, they just go to the lowest common denominator which is usually email"

Ashim Pal, Meta Group

This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International