In the wake of a recent adverse court finding for a major media company in Australia, I was interviewed by The Age on the business dangers of email. I argued that communication within and between companies should be embraced rather than feared, but proper governance inevitably meant that one-on-one emails were not the best way to manage this unstructured content.
You can read the full article at http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/teamwork-avoids-dangers-of-oneonone-emails/2007/09/09/1189276544211.html or listen the podcast at the same site.
September 14th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Hi Robert,
I totally agree with your view in TheAGE. In fact, just recently, I tried to put forward
the idea of utilizing collaboration at my work place, with the ultimate goal of streamlining communications in a potentially big project group and also as an efficient means of harnessing discussions on various topics in the project.
The collaborative tool that I have suggested is the infamous Basecamp, as hosted by
37 Signals.
I believe most of the resistance to the idea comes from the fact that email has been universally accepted as a means of communication, whether it be one-to-one or one-to-many. However, the case reported in the article above is a great cause for demonstrating the benefits of social collaborative tools behind the firewall.
In my experience, I have encountered a number of times of receiving broken
communications in crucial phases, later to find myself crawling through
the email chains to get the right information.
Cases like the above and your arguments may well accelerate the adoption process and serve as a good precedent to arguing that we should collaborate more openly in the enterprise environment. At least it will help me in any of my future initiatives to promote the use of collaborative tools in a project setting. Fingers crossed.
I believe Google is doing best in promoting this within the company,
as I read in an article a while back that to attach a file to emails in Google is to be
ridiculed!!!
September 17th, 2007 at 9:15 am
Michael, you’re quite right - email is easy to use and universally accepted hence there is a strong resistance to moving away from it for critical communication. However, I also remember a time when email wasn’t used in the workplace and the change exercise that was needed to get it accepted - so like all things it just needs people like you pushing the benefits of using approaches that are appropriate for the business need.