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12月13日 The importance of e-mail in the enterpriseWill anything ever replace e-mail?
A lot of things are trying. Look at Facebook and it's ilk for social networking and ad-hoc communication. Look at SharePoint in the enterprise. There's plenty of good collaboration, social networking, and content management platforms out there. But somehow, I still can't spot how, for work, any of these things are more effective than Outlook. Useful supplements yes, and I do think that the value is Outlook not Exchange (and that MS should create a proper MAPI provider for SharePoint to replace it), but fundamentally the e-mail based approach of all of Outlook's functionality is still the best mix of flexibility and semi-structured information sharing for most office workers (and for a wider set of roles than sometimes targetted under the 'Information Worker' concept MS use).
Here's a few reasons why:
Why am I interested in this? At work, we frequently talk about, think about and advise companies on making best use of Microsoft collaborative technologies and I personally have watched them evolve over the last 8 years or so from a relatively expert (developer, architect or consultant) perspective. E-mail is fascinating because it's so essential to how many businesses work, and often there's a dichotomy between wanting to take advantage of new technologies that seem great (discussion boards for discussions, document libraries for document storage) from an organisational management perspective but that are less flexible or usable for end-users and suffer from low adoption without staff being 'incentivised' to use them (e.g. by locking down e-mail systems with quotas and policies).
Generally speaking, there is a tension between improving structured, centrally driven information management and and improving delegated, empowered end-user productivtiy. One wants to use technologies that improve information sharing and the collaboration around it, while allowing decisions to be made around the balance between centralised and end-user control of information. I am not a specialist in the theory of this area but I like to think about how the technologies enable the capture, promotion, discovery, retrieval and control of information (probably, some of my staff will now start correcting me on my lack of knowledge of information theory :)).
From that perspective It's interesting to compare e-mail (in usage and capability) to the following things:
In my opinion, e-mail, as exposed through modern business solutions, still represents an incredible breadth of capabilities for information sharing, collaboration and control and adds more value by deploying it to an organisation than any of the above (yes, I think for most businesses probably deploying only e-mail adds more value than deploying all of the above without e-mail). For now I'm out of energy and dislike 'thinking out loud' as I'll make foolish errors, so I'll elaborate at some point in the future when I've thought some more :). However I will add that for me, the latest social networking portals such as Facebook are doing an excellent job of combining and relating different sources of information to improve the richness and relevance of information presented to users. Rather than competing with e-mail as a communication format, they really show where e-mail and e-mail clients such as Outlook need to go next. Please, please combine content analysis, content metadata with (evolving) social networks and user behaviour to improve the richness and relevance of the information presented. Microsoft, Presence is not enough. |
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