Email activism, laziness, informal networks, and a whole load more

By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum

Since I chimed in one of his blog posts way back in 2007, fellow Sydney resident and pom Matt Moore and I have chatted frequently about social media, enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management. Matt is a knowledge manager at ASIC, soon to be independent consultant, and formerly IBM and Oracle, also being internal comms manager at the latter.

Last week, Matt invited me, Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon and IBM social media evangelist Luis Suarez onto a podcast interview, the focus of which was to be Luis's email detox program and the topic of email overload in general.

I don't think he calls himself one, but in my mind Luis is an "email activist". Someone taking the bull by the horns and shooting down unnecessary emails, demonstrating where and how you can defer conversations and host them on different channels - be it instant messenger, blogs, wikis and so on.

Luis has been on this detox for almost three months now, and by challenging each and every person who sends him one, he has managed to reduce the number of internal emails he receives by over a third. Pretty impressive. He's posted regularly on it, including charts (super organised!).

There are some notable points in the conversation:

• Luis works at IBM but email overload problems are just as apparent there. Luckily they have the software infrastructure to be able to change channels effectively.
• In reference to Gen Yers and other younger generations, email politics - the CC and BCC game - may become irrelevant. Luis says whenever people start playing that game with him he brings the conversation out into the open, saying there's no place for it in a professional environment, especially among your own team.
• Email is not appropriate for project development and collaboration. Not appropriate at all, yet we all do it.
• People are not lazy. Luis says in his detox experience, people think email is an easier option but when you look into it closely you're actually making more work for yourself. Again, I agree that people are not lazy in most instances. The laziness factor is surely symptomatic of a deeper problem, that is, we're just so damn used to working with email that digging out of this entrenched way of thinking is going to take some time - and concerted efforts by people such as Luis.

For me this conversation presented some clear examples of where social software tools can be of value to business:

• Improved, more fluid employee-to-employee communication.
• Easily searched and easily found project histories and conversations by way of using project blogs instead of chaotic email threads that branch off into dozens of fractured conversations.
• Rapidly developed project plans created and edited on wikis or simple shared, hosted documents, instead of sending round, and losing track of, endless word documents.

It's all pretty obvious, but when you hear about someone actively working to change the behaviours of a group of people, it's quite intriguing.

Also mentioned somewhere is IBM Atlas, a Lotus Notes-based software program that takes your IM conversations, blog posts etc. and analyzes the links and references to provide a social network analysis and determine topic experts and informal networks among employees. Identifying these networks is an increasingly important capability for businesses and the internal comms departments who, similar to marketers on the web, are looking to communicate by informal channels and determine influential people in an organization.

Much of the above comes down to improving, or better exploiting, communication and information - something Capgemini said last year could be worth £140 billion a year in the UK alone. I guess the hard part is finding more people like Luis.

Podcast files
Matt has listed the full index of the podcast and split it into three sections (originally planned for 30 minutes but went on for a fair bit longer). We spoke on Skype and the quality is not perfect in some places, but it's easy enough to keep up.

Part 1 (16:48, 4.0Mb)
01:00 - Luis describes his email detox moment in 2007.
03:10 - Luis challenges his email correspondents within IBM.
06:10 - How do you bring people round to the post-email world?
11:00 - Where is email appropriate?
13:00 - Instant messaging & social networking.

Part 2 (20:23, 4.8 Mb)
00:00 - Patrick raises the infrastructure question.
03:00 - Luis brings up wikis.
04:10 - Luis talks about discussing the detox with his team.
07:55 - The laziness issue.
09:00 - Do we love email?
10:00 - Alex mentions email overload.
11:00 - Generational issues.
13:00 - Patrick raises the politics question.
15:00 - Luis busts the whole thing wide open.

Part 3
00:00 - Alex agrees with Luis on email politics.
01:20 - Humans as political animals - in public or in private?
03:00 - Should we be selling tools or solutions?
06:00 - Applying social software to business problems.
08:00 - The email detox workout video.
10: 00 - Wrap up & next steps.