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February 12, 2006
Email Is Five Minutes Ago
This week, Bob Grauer at the University of Miami sent TeachingMIS a link to a Business Week article that addresses the low percentage of useful information that is delivered via email. According to the article, in many organizations email is fading as the communications tool of choice.
"Instead, workers there (Dresdner), as well as at places like Walt Disney, Eastman Kodak, Yahoo!, and even the U.S. military, are ditching e-mail in favor 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 (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 Corp.'s SharePoint, which allows workers to create Web sites for teams' use on projects."
While this article is interesting, it confuses modes and reasons for communication. If I want to notify someone the time of arrival of my flight, what's better than email? I don't need IM, nor any of the other alternatives they describe in the paragraph above. For 1:1 communication that need not be instant, what's better than email?
The last paragraph makes me think that they're after bigger prizes:
"So far, companies have invested 95% of their spending in business processes, according to Social Life of Information author and former Xerox Corp. Palo Alto Research Center director John Seely Brown. A scant 5% has gone toward supporting ways to mine a corporation's human capital. That's why fans say the beyond-e-mail workplace will become a key competitive advantage. In the global race for innovation, it's not as much about leveraging what's inside your factories' machines as what's in your employees' heads.
I don't think any of us ever thought of email as the tool of choice for knowledge management.
Still, as MIS educators, this article points out the need to teach this array of new IT-based communications facilities, and to help our students understand when to use which and for what.
Posted by DavidK at February 12, 2006 11:40 AM | Permalink