E-mail Is So 5 Minutes Ago

I saw this excellent article on Business Week online (registration site, but free).  It describes how Darren Lennard, the managing director in the London offices of investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, after a long and onerous day at the office:

"plucked his hyperactive BlackBerry from his silk-lined pocket and proceeded to smash it on the gleaming granite countertop of his London home."

Nice image - some of us may know what he feels like!  The article goes on to explain that, of the 250 e-mails he received each day 85% were totally not important to his job.  Dresdner are now ditching e-mail in favour of other software tools that function as real-time virtual workspaces.  Among them: private workplace wikis (searchable, archivable sites that allow a dedicated group of people to comment on and edit one another's work in real time); blogs (like this one - chronicles of thoughts and interests); Instant Messenger (which enables users to see who is online and thus chat with them immediately rather than send an e-mail and wait for a response); RSS (really simple syndication, which lets people subscribe to the information they need); and more elaborate forms of groupware such as Microsoft SharePoint or other collaboration tools which allow workers to create Web sites for a teams' use on projects.  The article suggests that organisations like Walt Disney, Eastman Kodak, Yahoo!, and even the U.S. military are following suit.

More forward thinking organisations have been using these sorts of collaboration tools for a while in place of chasing e-mail trails.  However, it's good to see the concepts getting mainstream airtime.
Technorati Tags : e-mail, blackberry, wiki, blog, IM, intranets, collaboration 

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