If you follow technology or business news you may have heard that Atos, a large (giant?) technology services company, have announced they intend to ban their employees from using internal email. The reason Atos has provided for the ban is because employees spend large amounts of their time checking and replying to internal emails (the average Atos employee receives over 100 emails a day), of which only 15% of were useful according to their analysis.
Currently they have imposed a deadline of 2014 for zero internal emails. The reason for the delay in implementing the ban is to ensure they have other methods of tackling the internal tasks normally associated with email programs (communications, calendars, document sharing etc.).
While Atos aren’t revealing exactly what tools they will be using to replace internal emails, Atos chief executive Thierry Breton mentions “a cloud computing environment, social networks, instant messaging, micro blogging, document sharing, knowledge community” in an interview with the BBC.
The announcement has incited mixed responses. Some seem to be lauding them as harbingers of the future, showing businesses the benefits of internal social networks and cloud computing. Others deride the plan as ‘stupid’ for merely shifting the problem of ‘interruptions’ and ‘unproductive communications’ from email to other sources.
Glo Networks have followed this news, and the responses from the technology and business worlds with a particular interest, not however, as you may imagine, because we think that Atos are being bold and innovative, rather for the opposite reason. We feel this isn’t a particularly new approach.
In fact here at Glo we already use internal emails minimally and have done so for years. Instead we rely on other tools which we find much more suited for our work. For example:
- We all sign in to an IRC chat channel which is used to keep in constant communication with colleagues in different offices.
- We use an internal wiki and knowledge base to share information between the team.
- We use VOIP services like Skype for when we need to talk to one and other.
While we understand that Atos intend to create their own all-in-one, integrated solution for their some 80,000 employees (as may be appropriate for a business of that size) we feel obliged to point out that alternatives to internal emails already exist and have for some time. While we’re sure that internal emails will continue to be used by many companies for the foreseeable future we also want to let any companies who want to break free from internal emails for whatever reason know that it can be done, right now!
