End of E-mail

Subject: The End of E-mail
Independent (London)
(07/25/07)
Shreeve, Jimmy Lee

About two years ago, Investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort recognized that e-mail was no longer working for the firm and began searching for an alternative to e-mail, one that could be preserved for important information and discussions and would not be bogged down by irrelevant office banter and spam.

Many other top business leaders have started looking for alternatives as well, including Warren Buffett, Phones4U owner John Caudwell, and Boston mayor Tom Menino. E-mail continues to become less and less efficient.

A recent poll by IT news site Silicon.com found that 33 percent of respondents receive between 51 and 100 e-mails a day, compared to a similar survey taken two years ago where only 23 percent of respondents said they received that many e-mails.

AOL researchers report that between 10 and 50 percent of work time is spent using e-mail, creating a huge impact on productivity. A study cited in a 2006 article in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication found that the average worker had 2,483 inbox messages and 858 filed messages.

To avoid the smothering weight of e-mail, Dresdner Kleinwort alerted several workgroups in the firm about a wiki called Socialtext, which allows the company to set up pages for specific projects and invite anyone to collaborate, edit text, add comments, hold discussions, and link to other documents, graphics, and Internet sites.

Dresdner Kleinwort found the Socialtext trial to be so successful it told employees not to use e-mail and set up its own proprietary wiki system with 5,000 pages and over 2,500 users around the world. Similar programs, such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, allow users to collaborate on documents on the Web.

Gartner research believes that by 2009 wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least half of all companies.