It may surprise readers to talk of the allure of something most people profess to hate: email. When I speak to companies it's one of the most cited sources of angst, and they're always looking to lessen their reliance on it. However, if you think about it, if they so hate its ubiquity, why is it still so ubiquitous? One reason is that, since its advent in the late Nineties, nothing has come close to offering an alternative. Why is that?
It's worth rewinding back to the Nineties and looking at how the inbox replaced the in tray. Suddenly employees could get on with their work independently without having to rely on colleagues to prepare and manage the information they needed to work with. The advent of the Blackberry only emphasised that trend: now you weren't even tied to a particular location. How wonderful.
Except it wasn't. All that freedom came with a price: for a while we all maintained clerical resource, but gradually they morphed from high value information management (keeping the files organised) to lower value executive assistance, an opportunity for any status-hungry senior bod to accessorise. Who needs files, I hear you say? Well actually, everyone. From a position when a business had a single version of the truth for all their important subjects, like clients, in a single place, the modern enterprise binned that and instead relied on each person keeping up independently, a sort of manic chinese whispers. Except it was even harder than that, because you could never guarantee that you heard every whisper, and you didn't even know when you didn't.
So, why the catnip? Well, without other people in the way, employees could fashion and maintain their own little world, evoked through sub folders in outlook. Like piece workers waiting to spin their raw material in some Victorian village, people could sit looking at a single place, believing that to clear the inbox was to do a day's work. Delicious.
Except it's disastrous for the modern company. Not only has email not moved the dial in productivity, it's actually made things far worse. (Of course more stuff gets done, but it's hamster wheel stuff). A modern business is just a disparate collection of messages, with endless meetings to try and bring it together again. No one in the business is actually in charge of its most precious resource, information: they may have called it filing but it was actually much more than that in the old days. Technologists tend not to understand information, and certainly don't have the authority in a business to dictate policy.
Why is this so important? Modern productivity is really about manoeuvrability, and without a sense of where they are, a business cannot quickly move to where they want to be. So, how do we fix this? Clearly a return to a paper file would be wrong, given the locationless world we live in. Actually the answer lies in Enterprise Social Media (the likes of Slack, Teams and Tibbr), but not as the vendors themselves would have you use it (except for Tibbr). For a filing cabinet, read ESM channel. Structure it around your information, not your people. Give us a shout if you want more.