Tech-savvy firms begin to hit delete on ‘passe’ technology
END IN SIGHT FOR AGE OF E-MAIL?
A magazine once dubbed Calgary entrepreneur Michael Sikorsky “an Internet revolutionary.”
He’s raised millions of dollars for his technology ventures, given talks at Harvard Business School and has even been named a “CEO to watch” by CNN.
He’s constantly plugged in to his computer and smartphone.
Just don’t ask him to send an e-mail.
Sikorsky recently took a look at his 179,000 archived messages and decided to hit “delete” on the technology.
He uses a number of alternative methods of communication — text messages, Internet phone service Skype and even internal programmer tools like GitHub — but hardly ever electronic mail.
“I consider it such a waste of time. You’re a slave to it all day long,” Sikorsky says.
E-mail — a business mainstay for almost two decades — is increasingly being derided as unhip and unnecessary by a new generation of tech-savvy workers who prefer to communicate via social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as instant messaging services.
Those who dislike e-mail say the technology is not only old-fashioned, it’s actually a waste of time that costs companies millions of dollars a year in lost productivity.
It’s difficult to imagine a world without digital mail, a corporate tool now as ubiquitous as the office cubicle.
But if a French company is any indication, tomorrow’s workplace could be very different.
Atos — one of the largest information technology companies in the world with 80,000 employees — has pledged to stop using e-mail internally by 2014 because CEO Thierry Breton considers most of the messages irrelevant.
The extraordinary move sparked international headlines. How could a corporation of that size simply “ban” e-mail?
According to Breton, Atos staff will instead use instant messaging and chat-style collaborative services, as well as video conferencing, and file- and application-sharing technologies.
It might seem impossible — if not ridiculous — to kill off e-mail, but companies around the world are doing it every day.
At New Wave Media, a Calgary-based marketing firm, staff rarely send internal e-mails anymore.
“When time is of the essence, we never, ever send an e-mail. It’s kind of an unwritten rule around here,” says president Tara Molina.
“I would actually rather pick up the phone or use Blackberry Messenger. It’s much faster.”
A couple of years ago, New Wave set up an in-house Twitter account that’s all but replaced the need for employees to e-mail one another.
A surprising number of clients also prefer to be contacted through social media, Molina says. “We usually just send them a quick tweet or even a Facebook message because we find they respond quicker than if we send them an e-mail.”
Observers say the move toward zero-e-mail policies in the workplace is likely a response to pressure from Generation Y, which grew up with the technology and increasingly finds it clunky and limiting.
For many of them, e-mail is something their parents use, says Tom Keenan, a professor in the University of Calgary’s faculty of environmental design and a frequent commentator on technology trends.
He points to the founder of social networking site Nexopia, who likes to wear a T-shirt that says “Nexopia: Because your mother is on Facebook.”
The same kind of stain is on e-mail, he notes.
“It was invented in the 1970s, became popular in the 1990s and is in fact passe in some ways, mostly because it’s not entirely instantaneous,” says Keenan.
“You have to go and check it and people want stuff right now, not in five minutes or even one minute.”
Half of all Canadian technology chiefs who participated in a 2011 survey on the subject said they believe “real-time” communications tools — such as SharePoint and Yammer — will become more popular in the workplace within five years and eventually overtake e-mail.
The technology may even be a health hazard. Researchers at the University of California say people who check their work e-mail regularly exhibit higher states of stress and less focus than workers who continue to to do their jobs while cut off from e-mail entirely.
It raises the question: is e-mail destined to follow fax machines and photocopiers into the annals of corporate obscurity? Probably, but technophiles predict it will be a slow death. “E-mail is a bit like democracy: It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the best one we’ve got,” says Doug Lacombe, a Calgary-based social media strategist.
Lacombe believes it’s far too premature to expect companies to kill off e-mail, especially in a city like Calgary. “We have an intense concentration of publicly listed companies and a highly regulated oil and gas industry that values written records to track employee communications with customers and investors,” he said. “A written record is a good thing for a company and instant messaging does not provide that.”
The issue appears to be a generational one. If today’s students prefer to use real-time messaging tools on sites such as Facebook, the trend will eventually find its way into the world’s boardrooms and cubicles.
“Organizations are tied to e-mail for many reasons. It’s there, it’s easy to use and it offers a number of great tools,” said Ron Johannesson, CEO of Calgary-based Techworks Solutions Providers. He doesn’t think the corporate world can rid itself of email, because right now there isn’t a better option to replace it.
But it will happen, he predicts, because today’s high school graduates are tomorrow’s CEOs.
“The next generation of teenagers are really going to push things. E-mail isn’t dead — but it’s the beginning of the end,” says Johannesson.