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Disdain for email

originally published ARP2008 and still relevant 11 years later!

It is hard to believe that this year I will be celebrating my 20th year working in an office environment. As many know from reading this blog I started as a field service technician, a position which is still dear to my heart. I have been carrying the same flag for many years, that flag is focused on creating a culture which shares and learns from one another. Facilitating a culture which is continuously evolving as it has matured to a point where the organization is self perpetuating success and opportunity for its members. The vehicle used to drive towards this perfect culture has always been collaboration. [Collaboration: the act of working together with one of more people in order to achieve something].

At the root of my disdain for e-mail is the fundamental realization that e-mail is functionally opposite of collaboration. [E-mail: computer to computer communication system: a system that allows text based messages to be exchanged electronically]. To add insult to injury the act of using email, with its ease of "copying" recipients, spreads this "me culture" exponentially through an organization. 

So what may be done? It only takes one person at a time to start the collaboration engine. Next time you receive an e-mail, ask yourself "where will I find this six months from now and how will I share this information with the rest of my team?" You will quickly discover that the home for information is not a folder in your mailbox. Instead, this information belongs in SharePoint (related to an internal department team site, project workspace, posting location), CRM (related to a customer, contact, opportunity); Work order management system (related to a customer, site, work order, contract).  You can stop the corrosive behavior and reply or initiate your next correspondence with a link back to the content and a suggestion for recipients to "set their alerts" thus preventing your requirement to send reminders long-term. 

I can tell you, from personal experience, that when I need to find information regarding any topic I turn to our enterprise collaboration engines. Are you someone who says "where the heck did I put that…?" If someone asks me about a vendor or partner, immediately I travel to CRM, all of the information is in one location. Questions about a project or initiative, that’s right, project server plan and workspace. If each of us commits to taking one e-mail a day and moving it into a collaborative environment you will be floored on the impact this has on your own computing habits. 

Let’s all start TODAY and Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate.

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