Don't send that Email!
SteveSome months back I posted about the Technology Services company Atos Origin's plan to eliminate the use of internal email as a tool for communication for its $10B plus organization. Well yesterday additional news about the 'Email Elimination' plan were released, a good summary of the news can be found on this piece from Yahoo!News.
Email Jail
From the Yahoo! piece on Atos', (really Atos CEO Thierry Breton's), take on how Email is throttling internal productivity, the ability to find information, and to actually be effective at its main purpose - communicating.
Breton, the French finance minister from 2005 to 2007, told the Wall Street Journal he has not sent an email in the three years since he became chairman and CEO of Atos in November 2008.
“We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives,” he said in a statement when first announcing the policy in Feburary. “At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.”
The company says by 2013, more than half of all new digital content will be the result of updates to, and editing of existing information. Middle managers spend more than 25 percent of their time searching for information, according to the company.
While the details of the plan have not seemed to change much since I first posted about this in February of this year, what is notable is that nine months later Breton and Atos still seem as committed to the 'no internal email' policy as ever.
And as I asked readers back in February, I will ask again today, (a question that might be particularly pointed for USA readers still digging out from email jail after a long holiday):
Could you actually work without (internal) email?
Could a company of any scale and size at all successfully manage information, workflow, communication, and so on without sending ANY internal email?
How many of you are thinking it might be nice to work for Atos right about now?
Reader Comments (3)
An email free workplace sounds great and can be done, especially internally, but it will take a lot of setting up and a great system to keep everything in order. Email isn't really efficient and in most offices that I've seen, internal email is mostly made up of messages that can be either sent by instant messenger or by placing on a project management board. Getting rid of email will free up a lot of wasted time. The only question is what are people going to do with all of that extra time?
I suppose get more things done in less time? Maybe have more time to conjure up new ideas and innovations? Go home early? Hopefully it will result in improvements across the board. Thanks very much for your comments.
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