Hacking the Good Days...
Am at a conference Social Tools and IBM’s Luis Suarez is sharing his musing on thinking outside the inbox.
From an average of 30-40 emails to his inbox a day, Luis has reduced that to 20 emails a week and now is a *zero* inbox. There are 2 main drivers for Luis to shift his information collaboration hub to social software such as wikis, twitter, internal facebook or even IM:
(1) Content is dead – one you hit the publish button your content is outdated already. Information moves fast – we need to train ourselves and our system to filter signals from noise, and email is not helping at all.
(2) Young people – ‘emails are for grandparents’, they are the champions of Instant Messages / live communications. In the age of where firewall no longer applied to companies with staff armed with increasingly powerful personal phones, companies will become obsolete if they do not accommodate these new medium of communications.
So as a social computing evangelist @IBM, Luis shifts from
*me -> my email -> fighting my way through corporate membrane*
to
**me -> my social network -> my community -> getting the work done*
What I concur the most is that email does a very bad job in collaboration, but I am not sure if wiki can be a complete substitute. As although I identify with the fact that focus should not be tool or business (process), but people; it is a challenge to have the confidence to shift your work-social-network to another medium given the vast diversity of technographic profiles of your workmates.
Key takeways:
We live in a post-firewall paradigm, so don’t even think of controlling information access for next generations of workers. How can companies build and continue to evolve a fluid and effective knowledge system for now and the future? Think about open collaboration, many-to-many resolutions, and infrastructures that encourage reciprocity of knowledge management, e.g. Visibility of internal facebook-software, colleagues chime in when you’re on holiday. But start from you – and others will follow. Have the guts! 
hah.
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Maybe it’s just my old age, but I can’t get my head around managing instant messaging knowledge. There doesn’t seem to be enough tools to extract important parts of IM conversations for easy lookup.
Email is starting to have the right sort of tools – tagging and smart filtering, but it’s still not good enough to filter the useful information into something manageable.
A wiki sounds like the obvious option, but so far it feels more like copy and paste, rather than a natural process.
The combination of tagging and exporting to a wiki does make some sense, but I don’t know whether such export functionality exists above and beyond a single email at a time.
My gut feel is that both email and IM should feed useful/flagged/important information into some sort of GTD system, and that GTD system should be a person’s main repository of information. A wiki can make a great GTD system, but its lowering the barrier to automatically getting content from email and IM into the wiki that makes this a burdensome task.
But its got to be a GTD system that can converse with email and IM systems, as well as being as available as possible, wherever in the world you are.
(I’ve prototyped one idea of how this can work. If only I had the time and impetus to flesh it out into what I think I need)
I agree with Isofarro.
And I would add that a lot of it depends on network effects. If you can get those you work with to move to an “update the wiki” culture then you can move to an update the wiki mode. However if anyone you need to work with is still sending you emails your wiki remains your own thoughts.
Don’t have time to write an interesting comment right now, but fortunately here’s several I made earlier -> http://bankervision.typepad.com/bankervision/2008/08/email-bankrupt.html#comments
Hi Cathy could you email me please? thanks.
[...] Suarez, the star of IBM social software branch, is known for his say-no-to-email initiative that inspired my last blog post. Although I get mixed feedbacks from you guys, it is hard to [...]