Knowledge Dies with Email

1/10/2012

I just read an article that a huge company, Atos, is banning internal emails and switching to a community based collaboration tool and instant messaging. Good for them and I hope more companies plan to follow their lead.

The CEO of Atos hasn’t sent an email in three years. He plans to entirely eliminate internal email within the next 18 months, driving his 74,000 employees to communicate via instant messaging. This trend, seen at the corporate level, mirrors the email trends of the younger generations. Use of web-based email among young people has taken a nosedive, as illustrated in the chart below.



Email is killing knowledge between companies, even though email still remains the top pick for communication.

For example: one of my colleagues emails a question to the person they think is the subject matter expert. Here are a few problems that happen:

1. They may get an answer, but only they benefit from the information received. The information is not archived and searchable for future questions, which may cause the same person to answer the same question multiple times.
2. The answer is not shared with the entire group so the group cannot benefit from knowledge sharing.
3. Sometimes someone may ask a question, and the person they ask is not the expert and passes that question to the next and so on. The time it takes going back and forth could have been avoided by asking the community, which has a broader audience.
4. Leadership has no insight into potential issues, challenges, or opportunities. By creating a community, they would be able to review the data and analytics so they can make better informed decisions with moving the business forward.

Email is still a great tool and has its place within an organization as a notification tool. However, when you want to share knowledge within a group, a collaboration community is the way to go.