And the Answer Is...Email???

Unified communications solutions have come up with many innovative ways to facilitate support for communications and collaboration within organizations. Audio and video conferencing, collaborative workspaces, customer portals, presence to identify best access to colleagues, and many more capabilities are opening up wonderful new possibilities.

Yet, in our consulting work we see some interesting patterns emerging. In talking with two companies recently, both seem to be stuck in using email as the primary accepted method for communications and collaboration. In one situation, the organizational culture seems to be “let a thousand flowers bloom.” There is a strong bias against imposing standards for either platforms or application clients. Each group within the company, or in many cases individuals within a group, are free to use whatever devices, operating systems, and applications they choose. About the only thing that works cleanly is, you guessed it, email!

At another company, the IT staff seems to have been successful at thwarting the use of many new capabilities including popular public IM, peer-to-peer voice or video, or social media sites. “Too much security risk” is the predominant response. The result, of course is that email, the lowest common denominator, is used when an IM or a quick chat or other UC capabilities would have been more effective.

These examples are perhaps a bit overstated, as both companies have come to us seeking more effective ways to foster communications and collaboration. However, it’s interesting that in this new world people are still reverting to (or stuck in) a decades-old communications medium. 

Certainly email has benefits—easy to use, universal access across platforms, an archival record, and the ability to support asynchronous communication which can be helpful in these too-busy times. On the other hand email can be notoriously inefficient. How much time do you spend sorting through your dozens or hundreds of messages? How easy is it to find the one message that you need? Document collaboration through email attachments often means overlapping revisions that just take time to consolidate. The ease of “Reply All” means that we are copied into far too many message threads. And, since an increasingly large number of us are primarily using smart phones, our “all thumbs” approach to email communications strikes me as woefully inefficient. This is a productivity improvement?

There are some techniques that can improve efficiency.Speech recognition is getting much better, certainly for laptop computers, and as Moore’s law works its wonders excellent dictation recognition will be extended to handheld devices as well. There are also increasingly good programs to sort incoming email into folders for more efficient review. But you generally still have to wade through all those email volumes at some point.

Email certainly has its place, but in most cases it should play a supporting role to an overall communications and collaboration strategy, not be the main event. In too many firms, it’s become the default solution when better ones are available.  Part of what’s needed is for companies to take the critical step to understand the communications use cases in their organizations and match today’s UC capabilities to these requirements. But, until secure, interoperable, easy-to-use alternatives emerge, we are likely to see email continue have a prominent position—too prominent given its inadequacies. 

3 Responses to "And the Answer Is...Email???" - Add Yours

Marty Parker 9/2/2013 2:20:58 PM

Stimulating post, Don. Certainly raises some interesting points and questions.

Just a couple of comments:

If e-mail is the predominate media, the make the e-mail client, both desktop/laptop and mobile, the UC client. That's probably why Microsoft Lync, IBM Connections, and Esna's Google UC plug-in are doing so well, as they let the user invoke other communications tools from the e-maiil context.

Also, in response to your point, e-mail may not be the lowest common denominator. In some companies, it may be the most common denominator. Also, it provides some capabilities, like directory-based addressing and a written record, that other forms have not had. Yes, IM in enterprise-class systems can now be stored in the user's records. Sure, some voice messaging systems and some video systems have transcription tools; yet, as you point out, there's a way to go with those cross-media conversions.

Likely, the way out of the e-mail world is not to add more real-time voice or video calling. Good dictation tools, as you point out, would make everything more efficient, since the sender can usually speak faster than she can type and the reciever can read faster than he can listen. And

Overall, the collaborative workspace seems like a better path forward for e-mail users, and a comm-enabled collaborative workspace (including dictation) would be even bettter.

Thanks for the post.

Don Van Doren 9/4/2013 5:12:33 AM

Thanks for the helpful additions, Marty. Your suggestion of "most" common denominator is better than my "lowest". The challenge I see is that because it's "most", it's used. And the inadequacies and inefficiencies of email just extend those inadequacies throughout an organization's processes.

Email tends to take root in companies that are heavily document-centric, and your point about trying to shift to voice or video calling is spot on. Not the best approach. Rather, as you suggest, is to move toward comm-enabled collaborative workspaces. These UC capabilities are evolving to overcome many of email's shortcomings.

Thanks for your comments!

Art Rosenberg 9/5/2013 10:01:26 AM

Marty,

Glad to see you bringing in the transcription option as a key factor for user messaging interfaces. This is particularly useful for mobile users with multi-modal smartphones and tablets, who can't always talk, hear, read, or type because of their environmental circumstances. So they can listen to text messages and read voice messages.

I am noticing that many emails I send to people are being responded to quickly from their smartphones, which means that email is becoming more efficient and responsive just through faster delivery via mobile devices. They may not necessarily read any attached documents or go to a web link I provide in the text message, but they get the message and can acknowledge awareness of any information follow up required.

With features like voicemail-to-text, voice messages can also be delivered more efficiently to mobile or desktop recipients, and eliminate the need for manually listening to information in the message more than once, or transcribing key information contained in the message.

With UC-enablement, federated presence, WebRTC, etc., responses to email can now also become more flexible for the recipient, using any mode or medium of the recipient's choice. I believe that kind of flexibility for both a contact initiator the contact recipient is what makes UC most productive and efficient.