As I looked at my BlackJack for the 34th time this morning, receiving yet another email in an incredibly long thread of replies spawned from a single email sent to 15 people, I finally realized: Andrew McAfee is right. Professor McAfee tends to put it rather bluntly in his lectures: “email is dead”.

While his assertion may be a slight bit of exaggeration aimed at stirring up debate, I do believe he is correct in one regard: email has hit the extent of its usefulness as a platform for collaborating amongst a group of people.

But will we see an end to email? And why do people keep using it if its an inefficient method of collaborating?

The problems with email

I don’t think that we’ll ultimately see a complete end to email, but certainly we all need better tools to collaborate.

• When you’re on an email thread, your email inbox will quickly get flooded with multiple replies. In those cases, an issue may resolve itself before you’ve even finished catching up with the entire thread.
• Key people are often left out of the discussion by mistake on email chains, and attempts to get them back in the loop don’t always work. How many times have you seen “Adding [person] to the thread” and then watched someone reply to a message earlier in the thread, once again losing the person that was supposed to be on the thread?
• Documents that get attached to email threads get updated out of sequence, losing changes.

Why do people still use email to collaborate?

All of those problems were supposed to be solved with products like SharePoint and Documentum, but for some reason, most people in organizations that have these systems still don’t use them as a primary method of collaboration. Often times an issue will be initiated and closed entirely over email without any of the supporting documents ever being captured in an enterprise document management or collaboration system. Why is that?

• Email is still the most widely available application in a mobile setting. An average business user is more likely to have access to email from a mobile device, such as a BlackBerry or smartphone, and in a time-sensitive situation, people revert to emails to insure a quick turnaround.
• Most current enterprise collaboration systems lack a good email bridge. It would be useful, for example, to be able to upload a new document to SharePoint or Documentum by simply attaching it to an email and sending it to the server to be processed.
• Most enterprise collaboration systems feel clunky. In the arms race to build it bigger, badder, and looking more like a desktop application, the major players end up adding too much functionality into the product, neglecting key usability points that have long been solved by consumer web applications.
• Most enterprise collaboration systems lack a solid mobile interface. In part this is because their customers have traditionally not opted to purchase monthly data plans for their employees, but with mobile devices providing richer Internet browsing capabilities, this is rapidly changing.

Wikis: a modern collaborative environment

As a person with a software development background, my preference for a collaborative environment is a wiki system. But to the average business user, a wiki is still a “geek thing” that they don’t quite understand or feel comfortable using. That’s largely the reason that they’ll revert to writing an email or sending a Word document. Over time I’m sure that more business users will expand their comfort level with wikis, but there is also room for improvments in the features of wikis to make the average business user more confident using them. Certainly they have evolved: most opensource and nearly all commercial wikis include both a plain text and rich text editor, something that was completely absent from the first incarnation of wikis.

Conclusion

Email as a collaboration platform has certainly reached the extent of its usefulness in that arena. But email certainly has uses beyond collaboration, and it will certainly live on as bridge to future collaborative systems. As wikis and other types of emerging collaborative environments mature, these tools will be considered as necessary as email to the daily life of every business user or knowledge worker.

UPDATE 6/14/2008: The New York Times featured an article about “email overload” and how companies like IBM, Microsoft, Intel and Google are fighting against it.

Filed under: Enterprise Web, Knowledge Management, Social Computing, Wikis