Maybe you heard about Atos, the global information technology services organization headquartered in France that just banned the use of email within the company. Its CEO, Thierry Breton, recently instituted a policy change requiring all 74,000 Atos employees to switch to a Facebook-like interface and to use instant messaging for all internal communications.
Breton claimed that much of the email employees were receiving was just time-wasting noise, anyway; he estimated that of the 200 messages each employee receives per day, maybe 10 percent were actually useful to the business, and as much as 18 percent were spam (you might inquire as to the quality of the company’s spam filter). But Breton’s goal is to completely eradicate the use of email for internal communications within 18 months.
Note, of course, that it’s only internal email that Breton is going after; email will continue to be the communication vehicle of choice for external emails with clients and partners. But in the past 6 months, the organization has managed to reduce its volume of internal email by 20 percent.
What do employees think of the change? According to an Atos spokeswoman, response “has been positive, with strong take-up of alternative tools.”
But it’s reflective of the observed decline in email usage across certain demographics, particularly the precipitous decline in email usage by persons below the age of 35 – users who rely on tools like Facebook, IM, and texting instead. It’s the message that all those vendors of social business software have been pounding away at for a couple of years now: that these are the tools that members of the future workforce prefer to use for their communications, and so it behooves organizations to put those tools in place now, if not yesterday.
Granted, email still makes sense for certain business communications. And as difficult as it’s been for many corporations to address email from an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) standpoint, the challenge in any move to reliance on social technologies will be to make sure that all those IMs that are properly classified as business records get managed appropriately in the system of record. (Alas, there is no word on just how Atos is accomplishing this.)
But those organizations that remain on the sidelines with respect to social media just might want to ask whether there’s a use case to be made for social technologies for internal business communications, at the very least. And asking that question may open up consideration of the use cases to be made for external applications, as well – e.g. opportunities for using social tools to allow information-sharing and collaboration with customers, suppliers, and partners.