Concepts like “email bankruptcy” and “inbox zero”, along with reports that people under 25 increasingly use Facebook instead of email for most of their message give many people the idea that the entire conept is dying a slow, painful death. Don’t believe the hype.
According to Ed Brill, IBM’s Director of Social Collaboration, email isn’t dying, exactly. It’s just undergoing a metamorhosis. Given that the medium has only been around for 20 years or so, I asked him what it’s morphing into:
Why do so many people think email is dying?
For many people, it’s actually just wishful thinking. Inboxes can overflow with unread messages without proper email etiquette or use of mail management functions. With the emergence of social business tools, the thought “email is dying!” has certainly been hyped up in the media. But, while email is no longer the center of the collaborative universe, we still need email to perform the “activity management” function, and less of a “cc the world, the next world over, and the entire universe” communication function.
Why will it be around and how will it have to adapt/change?
At IBM, we see it as reinventing the inbox. Making the inbox more social. Email is evolving in two ways because we now have many other social business tools. One is that it is a notification service that brings together all of our relevant information and activities. Two is that emails sent to us now are truly actionable — every message in that inbox is relevant to the individual. That’s what email was originally conceived for, and what it is becoming again.
How will our work email and personal communication blend and how will we keep it separate (or will we?)
We’re seeing an explosion in the number of mobile devices, including tablets and phones, causing work and personal communication to blend. The burgeoning mobile workforce is expected to reach more than 1.19 billion by 2013, nearly 1 trillion Internet-connected devices will be in the market by 2012. For sure, in the future, the line between work and personal will dissolve, as it has already in several forms of social media, and our approach to email will evolve to ensure focus and attention on the right content.
Why won’t we abuse whatever new uses we find for it and screw it up like we have so far?
Well, the nice thing is that the inbox is being reinvented to encompass more social capabilities — so it’s keeping up with the times. Another thing about email is that it is a resilient store-and-forward tool. A decade ago, the biggest concerns in email were privacy and policy; before that, disk space; before that, whether it was a time-waster. The fundamental one-to-one/many asynchronous nature of email has not changed in a generation, and the fact that we continue to find new uses for it demonstrates the resilience of email system architecture and design.
So don’t go thinking you can just empty out that inbox quite yet. Still, leaders should work with their team to establish rules, norms and a process for communicating that helps you tame the email beast while it undergoes its latest change.
