E-mail Is Dead…Long Live E-mail! from Enterprise2Open

Andrew Filev , Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Category: Enterprise 2.0, Events
A couple of weeks ago, I took part in the Enterprise 2.0 Conference San Francisco. As usual, it was a very interesting event, and I was glad to make my contribution to the discussion. Below is the presentation I prepared for the Enterprise 2.0 conference’s Enterprise2Open session. My session was not meant to be just a regular speech. I wanted to create a discussion and share the stage with other E2Open participants. That is why many of the slides in the presentation contain questions to the audience.

View more presentations from Wrike com.
I thought it would be a good thing to continue this discussion here, in this blog. Please tell me what you think about the role of email in the day-to-day life of business users. Do you think email should be merely replaced by the new tools? Is there an opportunity to leverage email and integrate it with the Enterprise 2.0 applications?

Comments (10)

  • Barthox, Tuesday, 17 November, 2009
    Andrew, I have presented on a similar topic a few weeks ago, and I used this diagram to summarize it all

    http://www.slideshare.net/Barthox/positionnement-outils

    It is in French, but I believe that it is easily understandable ...

    Let me have your thoughts ...
  • corai, Thursday, 19 November, 2009
    very much agree! maye be, someday email will die but not now... we always find the best solution to combine emails, wikis, blog, etc together, TO MAKE PEOPLE WORK MORE EFFICIENTLY.

    Coria.
  • Andrew Filev, Monday, 23 November, 2009
    Barthox, Corai,

    Thank you very much for your comments! Much appreciated.
  • Michelle, Tuesday, 15 December, 2009
    Great presentation!
  • Phil Simon, Friday, 15 January, 2010
    Good stuff, Andrew.

    I found slide 20 to be really telling. I knew that the numbers were high for email but not that high. I had posted on this a few months ago (shameless plug alert):

    http://www.philsimonsystems.com/2009/10/collaboration/

    I'll definitely vote for your proposal.
  • Steven Kass, Sunday, 17 January, 2010
    Hi Andrew,
    Very nice presentation. And great topic!

    I find the stronger slides are slide 3 (Why are we still using emails?), slide 9, 16, 17, 19, 23, slide 28 great!

    I agree that it's best to leverage emails.
    Why are you not presenting more of the solution you propose with wrike?

    From my point of view it would be great to focus on slide 28 and have a way to 'tag' emails as discussion, or corresponding to specific project, task or change request. A more spohisticated email...

    Keep up the good work. I like the direction you are taking!

    Steven
  • Steven Kass, Sunday, 17 January, 2010
    Come to think of it, I still think email is antiquated because you don't get a clear status summary with emails.

    I just posted my PM tool wish here:
    http://askaboutprojects.com/questions/839/what-is-your-most-wanted-feature-that-no-pm-tool-has-given-you-so-far

    A tool that would integrate:

    * communication within the project team
    * and project / task / change request status

    For example: you click on a project, see a list of tasks and their status, click on a specific task and see the latest status update and can edit it and use that to communicate with the team on this specific task (so you don't need to use emails, and you can quickly see the latest status right there).

    It's basically your slide 28, without the emails :-) but instead a method of communication where you don't necessarily need to keep all history but just what you need to have.

    Steven
  • Sridhar Vanka, Monday, 18 January, 2010
    Wonderful presentation, Andrew !
    A couple of things that stand out:

    Context: There is a lot of information stored away in our emails, blogs, microblogs etc (I am talking about our Enterprise avatars and not our personal avatars). The need of the hour is to somehow get some context to this information. e.g. when I am writing an email to my team about an upcoming deliverable, wdn't it be great if I could see something that I had written on a previous deliverable, or something someone had micro-blogged about ?

    Integration: One of the problems organizations have is that they ask employees to use multiple tools for doing different tasks: one app for email, one for chat, one for a blog etc. Something that can integrate all this into a single app would ease up adoption. Users would get the space to start using more parts of integrated apps as they became more comfortable.

    Of course, both context and integration go together...its either both or nothing at all.
  • Andrew Filev, Wednesday, 20 January, 2010
    Sridhar, Steven, Phil, Michelle, thanks!

    Wonderful comments.

    Sridhar, I can't agree more. Gartner, for example, highlights profile aggregation as the hottest topic in enterprise social software nowadays, particularly for reasons you name. Profiles are easier to tackle, and we already have first wave of solutions that do that, like Xobni. Speaking about waves, Google Wave is a good take on integration. "One inbox to rule them all" approach is definitely on the minds of many. So in short, you are right on the spot and a lot of things coming out from collaboration vendors (including Wrike) in the next 3 years will be related to these two areas. Speaking even more broadly, as SaaS in general replaces many on-premise solutions, integration will become a critically important component. We see the same trend in the consumer space under the name of "semantic web" ("Web 3.0", automated agents, programmable web, etc.) where context and integration are again two big underlying drivers.

    Steven,
    Thanks for your great feedback and ideas. A lot of what we've done and working on at Wrike revolves around the things you highlight. I might put more focus on that, my initial concern was that I didn't want this to be or even remotely look like a vendor pitch, the ideas behind the deck are broader than that.

    Regards,
    Andrew
  • Phil Simon, Thursday, 21 January, 2010
    This is a really good string of emails.

    At the risk of shameless self-promotion, my next book deals with many of the changes and opportunities brought about by new technologies.

    I for one think that email can be killed (as a "collaborative" app), but people are still reluctant to embrace change.

    I've blogged about this a few times over the last few months. Companies such as Yammer and Vialect (to name a few) make tools for the organization based on the Freemium model. These make intranets look like chump change.

    Phil

Post a comment

Name (required)
Email (required)
Notify me of follow-up comments via email
How much is 2+2?
If you see this, leave this form field blank and invest in CSS support.
rss

Subscribe via RSS or

Andrew Filev

Andrew Filev is an experienced project manager and a successful entrepreneur. He has been managing software teams since 2001 with the help of new-generation collaboration and management applications. The Project Management 2.0 blog reflects his views on changes going on in contemporary project management, thanks to the influence of collaborative web-based technologies. More >>

twitter andrewsthoughts