Yes, that’s right! If you folks have been checking my Dopplr account recently, I am going to be on the road tomorrow afternoon, once again. This time around to Madrid, where I have been a few times already this year, but this time around for a specific and concrete event I will be participating in with a couple of good friends and colleagues that I am really excited about. No, this time around I won’t be doing one of those "See the Light - Thinking out of the Inbox" sessions per se, although I am sure I would be having the opportunity to chime in and make a few connections with what has kept me busy for the last five and a half months!

The main reason why I am flying out tomorrow afternoon / evening to Madrid is to participate in a specific workshop event on Thursday morning that I have been organising with a couple of colleagues from IBM Software Spain where we will be covering a number of different topics related to Social Computing and Enterprise Social Software. The workshop event itself actually fits in quite nicely with the current work I am doing at the moment, along with the rest of my team, where we are helping accelerate the adoption of social networking & social networking tools within the IBM Software (Tech) Sales teams, and, as a result of that, to the entire company as well, since most of the stuff we do is open, public and available to everyone (Inside of the corporate firewall, that is )

Thus tomorrow afternoon I am flying over to Madrid and on Thursday morning I will be spending most of the morning, working with a couple of colleagues, and good friends, too!, on a workshop that will have two different and specific sections. The initial one where I will be spending about one hour explaining further some more what social computing is all about, some of its main key concepts, then explaining a bit my team’s mission and goals and then, finally, hoping to engage in a good conversation as to why Enterprise 2.0 is there and why we should engage with it & start embracing it for our daily interactions while we collaborate, connect and share our knowledge with others.

Pretty much along the lines of the slide deck you will be able to find over at IBM: Web 2.0 Goes to Work, which has been shared in Slideshare already, and which was recently presented by my boss’ boss, Gina Poole, at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. But perhaps with a couple of modifications to accommodate an internal only audience. I have taken the liberty of embedding that deck from Gina to give you a glimpse of what I would be covering on that first hour:

IBM Web 2 0 Goes To Work Presentation:

Then, once we are done with the first hour, we would go for a short break, and right after that the good fun will start! A couple of IBM folks from the IBM SWG Tech Sales team and myself will be working through, following a workshop format, two hours of intense practical tips on how to carry out common tasks from our day to day interactions with a 2.0 flavour, while we collaborate and share our knowledge with other fellow peers by focusing on some of the most powerful, and popular!, Enterprise 2.0 applications that IBM has got as offerings and which we are also making use as part of the Technology Adoption Program:

- Lotus Notes 8
- Lotus Sametime 8,x
- Lotus Connections
- Lotus Quickr
- Lotus Sametime Unyte

At the same time, we would also be covering some of the various different IBM Research applications that we are all currently testing out through the TAP program I mentioned above and which would give folks a nice intro into the bleeding edge of some of the most compelling Enterprise 2.0 tools IBM has been testing for a little while now. Like, for instance, Fringe, Beehive, Small Blue / Atlas, Cattail, Media Library and a bunch of others. Plenty of good fun, I am sure!

A solidly packed workshop of closer to three hours which will keep us busy for most of the day. Then right after that, I will be staying in the city for a few hours before flying back home late in the evening. Thus I am not really sure whether I would be having plenty of time, but if you are around and want to get together for a coffee, tea, a quick chat or something, give me a shout and we can look if we can make it fit this time around…

I wish I could share some of the stuff we will be covering during this workshop, as I am sure you would be wondering right now whether I would be able to share the various materials, but I am afraid that this is an internal only event since some of the slides, plus most of the demo is of a sensitive nature containing information that may not be suitable for everyone. Hopefully, as time goes by I may be able to share some more of these materials after sanitising them a bit. We shall see how that goes …

Either way, we are back on the road! And I can’t wait to share with folks how they can be more productive in their daily routines by spicing up their interactions with some more 2.0 flavours coming from all over the place!

(Oh, did I mention how we actually organised the whole entire event through a Connections Activity and a conference call? Not a single e-mail was sent out whatsoever! )

Tags: IBM, IBM SWG, IBM Software, Technical Sales, Sales, Tech Sales, Workshops, Events, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Sharing, PKM, Innovation, Dopplr, Madrid, Spain, See the Light, Enterprise Social Software, Slideshare, Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, Gina Poole, Technology Adoption Program, TAP, Lotus Notes, Notes, Notes 8, Lotus Notes 8, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Sametime 9, Lotus Connections, Connections, Lotus Quickr, Quickr, Lotus Sametime Unyte, Sametime Unyte, e-meetings, Research, IBM Research, Fringe, Beehive, Small Blue / Atlas, Cattail, Media Library, Connections Activities, Productivity, Productivity Tools, Productivity 2.0

Coming closer to the six months barrier since I got things started, here I go again sharing with you folks the progress weekly report on my new reality of giving up on e-mail, corporate e-mail, that is. This time around on week 23 and after a very interesting week last week, where the blog posts I have shared previously seemed to have had the desired effect, judging by the number of e-mails received thus far today, Monday. But that would be the subject for another upcoming progress report. Not to worry…

Let’s get down to business though on what happened last week and see if there were any changes. Here is the weekly report:

As you would be able to see, things have gone back to "normal" with a total incoming count of 34 e-mails for the entire week! This is really good news, because it’s a clear indication of how the previous week was just an isolated event, as I have been explaining all along on that weekly progress report. It is also interesting to see how the days with the highest peaks of e-mails coming through are actually Monday & Tuesday, while Fridays seem to be pretty quiet, which means that folks perhaps would want to get their delegated tasks going at the beginning of the week, so that you can complete them by Friday. And on this particular day things seem to be rather quiet, because perhaps those folks presume you are busy working on the backlog of e-mails received at the beginning of the week. Interesting trend to watch…

Either way, you would be able to see how low the numbers seem to consistently be as we get closer to the weekend, which I can’t blame, because, at least, they are not carried over for over the weekend! But really pleased to see how the numbers have gone down substantially from the previous week, where an unusual activity was taking place given those two scenarios I described earlier on of an incorrect usage of e-mail.

Thus, what else happened during the course of last week? (You may be wondering, right?) Well, plenty of interesting things that I will be mentioning over here as time goes by over the next few days; however, for now, I would want to point you into a very insightful and thought-provoking link that I been reading lately and which pretty much comes to conclude the exact same thing I have been saying for a while on the kind of interactions that I still feel should be going through e-mail.

It is a link I have been talking about with Dave Pollard over in Twitter as we have been exchanging some thoughts on some of the stuff that he blogged about over nearly a year and a half ago! and what I have been doing over the last few months when I decide to stop using e-mail at work. Yes, indeed, this interesting link is from Dave’s blog itself under the very suggestive title "When Not to Use e-mail".

In it, you will see how Dave puts together a whole bunch of really good reasons as to why e-mail is perhaps not the best of scenarios to share information, knowledge, etc. with others in a specific context. I would strongly encourage you all to go ahead and read his very enlightening article, but for now, I am just going to tease you all with what you are going to find and here are the ten scenarios that Dave feels should not be handled through e-mail. Oh, by the way, I can’t stress well enough how much in agreement I really am with him on this one and you will see what I mean after you get reading further with this initial list:

"1. To communicate bad news, complaints or criticism
2. When you are seeking information that is not simple and straight-forward
3. When you are seeking approval on something that is involved or controversial
4. When you’re sending a few people complicated instructions
5. When you are asking for comments on a long document
6. To request information from a group on a recurring basis
7. To convey instructions to a large number of people
8. To achieve consensus
9. To explore a subject or idea
10. To send news, interesting documents, links, policies, directory updates and other ‘FYI’ stuff"

Like I said, to read further up on each of the different scenarios, I can certainly recommend Dave’s article itself. You would be off to a really great read and I am sure, after you have read it all, how it would come to  mind the one single item that is clearly an exception to what I am trying to do, as the main reason why I would still make use of e-mail while at work: those one-on-one private conversations of a confidential or sensitive nature, where only the other person & myself have a got a need to know. No-one else! For the rest, everything else is going out in the public, open & transparent collaborative and knowledge sharing spaces!

If you have taken a few minutes to read through Dave’s blog post you would be able to see how scenario after scenario he is already indicating, and very clearly, where e-mail keeps failing to meet our new demands of a more collaborative and knowledge sharing nature that the 21st century is providing us with while we get to embrace, more and more, Enterprise Social Software or Social Computing Tools in general.

Thus, if you still thought that you don’t need to re-purpose how you are using e-mail on a daily basis, read further Dave’s article and I am sure it would make you think twice about it again. To me, I just got convinced more and more how I need to keep pushing for re-purposing my incoming e-mails, because e-mail is clearly not meeting my needs any longer, while I am attempting to work smarter, not necessarily harder… How about you?

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Transparency, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, E-mail Abuse, Trust, Visibility, Awareness, Think, Re-purposing E-Mail, Delegated Tasks, Dave Pollard, Twitter, Confidentiality

As I am starting the process to wrap up another very interesting week at work with plenty of things happening to get things going with a very much anticipated weekend, here I am again sharing with you folks some further details on the weekly progress report from the series I have been doing over the last few weeks, where this time around plenty of things have actually happened. We are now on to Week 22, five and a half months already, since I decided to start giving up on e-mail, i.e. corporate e-mail for my daily interactions to collaborate and share knowledge.

And as you would be able to see from the graphic from the weekly progress report, that particular week has been rather rough, specially since the number of incoming e-mails has reached up to the second highest number of e-mails received in those five and half months! Yes, that is right, not very pleased at the moment, but here is the report anyway:

I am sure that if you come to check the different e-mail counts from previous weeks, you would notice how the second half of the week was actually rather all right, and along the lines of what I have been experimenting in the last few months, however, both Monday & Tuesday were rather special, to put it mildly. As you can see, the numbers went sky high in there, 13 & 15, respectively, to then, by the end of the week make a total of 47 e-mails! 47!!!

Thus you may be wondering what actually caused that sudden increase, right? Well, two different things. Both of them not very pleased with, to be honest, although one of them seemed to be a one time event, and here is why:

- Reason #1: people, who got a bit surprised?, perhaps, of the 15 minutes fame from the NYTimes article I got published a couple of weeks back under "I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip", decided to send a couple of e-mails whereas in the past they would be using, with me already, IM or several other social software tools.

Probably to prove the point that they could break the whole thing whenever they would want to. Perhaps because they don’t think for themselves they can break their e-mail addiction any longer, like I did. Maybe because they felt that e-mail was the easy way out to get the message across and they could move on to something else, since they have delegated their tasks on to others with those e-mails.

Either way, I think this was a one time event because this week’s report, which I will share over the next few hours, didn’t show that increasing trend. Things have gone back to normal. Phew!

So, perhaps they were teasing me, after all!

- Reason #2: this particular reason I am about to explore though has brought some growing concerns on why I strongly feel that e-mail is broken as a collaboration and knowledge sharing tool. It has got to do with how folks get to abuse, and pretty badly, the usage of "Reply to All" (That lovely e-mail button that, if it were for me, and along with the Attachments one, would be gone in no time!).

Yes, that’s right! The reason why those two days were very active in the e-mail front was because a couple of folks kept replying to each other in e-mail AND including EVERYONE ELSE  in the conversation, when they DIDN’T need to be there in the first place! I am sure this scenario does sound familiar to you all! No doubt!

This is one of the reasons why to me, e-mail is broken in this particular respect, not because of the tool itself, but of how much people have abused it over time. Why would people keep "Replying to All" when we all know most of those folks don’t need to be there in the first place? How many e-mails a day do you usually get where this particular feature has been abused? I bet that plenty of time is wasted having to process such e-mails, more than anything else because you first have to read it, then see how is on the list of the .cc, then evaluate whether you would need to respond or not, and if not process it accordingly! Goodness!

Here is the thing though that changes the whole aspect about "Reply to All".  I just wish people would understand that unless I show interest myself on being in such an e-mail thread, please DO NOT include me beyond the first initial e-mail. In most cases I probably even don’t need to be there in the first place, so why would you want to add clutter to my e-mail count? To get exposure? To get visibility you are getting involved in the conversation? Or to show everyone you are active working on something for the rest of the folks on that e-mail thread? Or to show your boss you have got a record of getting folks involved? Or to continue further with your e-mail addiction, specially when people from the "Reply to All" reply back asking why they have been added into that distribution list?

Think! Challenge the "Reply to All" button! Unless you have got the additional interest from the other parties to be involved, don’t include them. You know why? Because we all trust you that you will do the right thing with that task. No need to include us on it in a frenzy exchange of e-mails that would take us all nowhere! All of you, including me, would be much better off! For sure.

"Oh, hang on" -you may say -"But you are going to miss some important stuff we are discussing over here!". "Oh, really?" -I would go- "Well, if it is that important, not to worry, I will find it out (Or it will find me!) in its due time when I do really need it! Or, even better, if it is really that important and crucial for us all, don’t use e-mail! Use something much more sophisticated, open, public, transparent, to share that piece of knowledge or information so that EVERYONE benefits from it! That, to me, would be really important!"

Thus, as you can see, the high numbers from week 22 were, mostly, due to the fact that people seem to be obsessed, rather massively, if not addicted, with the "Reply to All" button. It seems like they could not live without it. It sounds as it is incredibly tempting to see an e-mail with a bunch of folks already on the addressee list and your fingers start getting that nervour reaction that prompts you to hit that specific button! DON’T! Spare us!

Now you would probably understand why I just wish I would wipe it out completely! It doesn’t have any purpose for the one-on-one conversations that I have been mentioning are the best, and most suitable, for e-mail interactions. I am starting to think, more and more by the day, that if you would want to break your e-mail addiction, because that is what we are suffering from at the moment, or, at least, if you would want to control it a bit, STOP abusing the "Reply to All" button!

We would be eternally grateful …

Have a good one everyone!

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Transparency, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, New York Times, NYTimes, Reply to All, E-mail Abuse, Attachments, Trust, Visibility, Awareness, Think

Now that this blog has turned itself into A KM Blog Thinking Outside the Inbox, I thought I would keep things going further by commenting on interesting links I have bumped into over the last few days and which basically touch on the subject of how e-mail is in a serious need to re-purpose itself, if it would want to survive for the following few years ahead of us. Latest of these examples is the superb blog post put together by Alex Iskold, over at ReadWriteWeb, titled "Is Email In Danger?".

In that particular blog post, Alex comes to cover the role of e-mail, both in the consumer market as well as the corporate world, by giving us a very helpful and insightful trip down the memory lane where he talks about the key role that e-mail has been having in the further development of what we know as the Internet. However, at the same time he is commenting on the fact of how little by little, but steadily, the emergence of social networking tools is undermining such paramount role that e-mail has been having all along, to the point where a good chunk of conversations are already starting to happen through those other social software tools and not e-mail itself.

Examples like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Slideshare, Twitter (And whatever other micro-sharing option available out there you can think of), FriendFeed, ma.gnolia, etc. etc. are some very good ones of how things are starting to shift away from our good old use of corporate e-mail. As you can imagine, while I got busy reading what Alex was mentioning, I just couldn’t help smiling a bit as something that I have been doing myself for a while, but perhaps much heavier for the last five months, since, as you well know already, I have given up on e-mail (Corporate e-mail) in order to collaborate and share my knowledge with other knowledge workers much more effectively.

However, what I found rather interesting from the article put together by the author of the article was a couple of gems that I thought I would share over here as well as they are very descriptive of how I feel myself about the whole e-mail thing, which I am sure you are going to find as well very relevant, since this is not the first time that I mention such thing. Thus here we go:

"Since email was the first killer app for the web, it’s used for everything. We’re now observing a fragmentation cycle where we’re discovering better ways of passing around information and getting things done.

Email is fundamentally great at substantial person-to-person communication. The following diagram illustrates why email is facing competition. It cannot effectively support broadcast (except for spam) and it’s still poor at helping with tasks and projects." (Emphasis mine)

You would have to agree with me that those two paragraphs are very representative of what I have been mentioning all along in the last few months: e-mail is perhaps not the best of collaboration and knowledge sharing tasks as it keeps failing come together when handling one to many and many to many interactions (Remember one-on-one interactions of a confidential or sensitive nature are probably the only instance where it is still rather useful on its own! But forget about everything else!). And the particular diagram that Alex has included just after those two paragraphs is rather representative of what’s currently happening with e-mail on how it has become rather stagnant, specially on the corporate world:

From there onwards, you would be able to read some further interesting facts as to why e-mail is facing some competition and how, more and more, e-mail is becoming much more fragmented (Which is a good thing, by the way!) and how a whole bunch of conversations that use to come through e-mail are now going to find various different ways of getting across to you. Much faster, much more efficiently and effectively and with one single key aspect added new into the mix: you are now the one in control of those interactions by walking away from e-mail and you decide where else to take the conversation!

Finally, one of the items covered by Alex, towards the conclusion, which I thought was rather interesting was this specific paragraph:

"We’re likely to see a consumer shift from email towards more compact forms of communication, but in the enterprise the email hold is strong and unlikely to be replaced any time soon."

Interesting remarks, but I must say that I have always thought that the consumer market is not the only one that is going to successfully get rid of e-mail by moving away most of those conversations. The corporate world will also have a say in it. And more than anything else not because most folks may well think that e-mail is dead (It is not, believe me!), but because it is that gentle push from the consumer market that will be forcing e-mail to evolve and move on with the times. Move into a space where it could certainly explore some wild ideas on how to become much more open, public and transparent, not just for a single individual, but for an entire group, i.e. a team or a community!

Because those same end-users who have been consumers for quite a while and who have discovered the wonderful world of e-mail-less would also start demanding that e-mail smartens up quite a bit, because otherwise people would find other means of communicating, collaborating and sharing their knowledge. And, believe me, there would be plenty of really good choices out there that will help those knowledge workers forget what, once upon a time, was their primary method of communication & collaboration.

Hope that e-mail will realise that it is time for it to become fragmented and focus on improving the overall user experience of those tasks that it knows how to handle well and properly: one-one-one conversations, and let all of the rest of interactions go in to the social computing tools as they are all much better suited options to engage in one to many, many to many interactions! And guess what? This is not something new. Most of these social software tools, like blogs and wikis, have been there for as long as 10 years. So we are not really discovering a new world. The consumer market has got it already figured out & more and more they will be demanding to make use of the tools they use outside of their companies to bring them into behind the firewall!

And here is where e-mail will have to decide to be flexible, change, adapt, move on, innovate & come up with something better, if it would want to survive over the next few years, because otherwise I am sure you all know what will happen next… (And it won’t be pretty for e-mail, I can imagine!)

For some of us it HAS already started. How about you? Is your e-mail still dragging you back into the 20th century? Do you think it would evolve and re-create itself to meet the demands from the knowledge workforce of the 21st century? Or rather will it become more rigid, stricter, with no sense of innovation making it move forward and therefore slow you down on your quest to work smarter, but not necessarily working harder?

When was the last time that you saw e-mail going through some really key and fundamental changes since it was first invented to match the current collaboration and knowledge sharing needs? Not sure about you folks, but I know exactly where I would want to be!

And you?

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Transparency, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Productivity Tools, Tools, Tacit Knowledge, Explicit Knowledge, Content Management, Content, Social Capital, ReadWriteWeb, Alex Iskold, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Slideshare, Twitter, FriendFeed, Ma-gnolia, Fragmentation, Evolution

Continuing further with some additional commentary on the input shared by folks over at I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip, and since the previous blog post was getting a bit too much on the long side, here I go again, but this time around with Part II of that extended commentary on a couple of thoughts that I would want to reference as well over here, regarding my new reality of no longer working with corporate e-mail. Thus let’s move on with the next topic at hand…

- The power of an RSS / Atom feed aggregator and Bacn E-mail

I have mentioned this in the past a few times already, but I thought it would be worth while again taking the opportunity to revisit this particular item. If you would ask me for one of the most undervalued technologies from the social computing world of the 21st century I would definitely I have to say that RSS / Atom feeds would be it! No doubt about it! I am not sure why, whether it is due to the weird naming convention used of those concepts or perhaps the true innovation behind the entire concept where you no longer hunt down new content, you eventually get Web sites sending the new content directly to you, it looks like RSS / Atom feeds will continue to struggle for grabbing the necessary attention to make you incredibly much more productive.

To me, though, they are the main application within the 2.0 world that allows me to make sense of it all in such a way, an important way, by the way, that they allow me to be in control of what I would want to syndicate or subscribe to and that way I can keep up with everything that I am interested in. Something that doesn’t really happen with e-mail where you no longer have the control, no matter what folks would say about it.

So, at this point in time, and in case you may not be familiar just yet, you may be wondering what an RSS / Atom feed reader is, right? Well, I think in this case we wouldn’t have many problems trying to explain what they are, because the great folks at Commoncraft have already done a superb job at it, and in less than 4 minutes, trying to explain, in Plain English, what RSS is all about and how to get things going with feed readers. I can certainly guarantee you that after watching such a short video you would be wondering how you could have lived in the corporate world without an RSS / Atom feed reader all along!:

(Now you know how I keep track of everything that is going on in my 2.0 world, without any effort and without going out of my daily routines. It is all integrated into my daily workflow. Yes, that’s the whole point behind a feed reader: your own single point of contact with the outside world, whatever that may well be!, at your own pace and under your own control!)

However, and after having said all of that, let me share with you something else that you may find a bit contradictory, but fun! There is one aspect of e-mail that I really really enjoy and I just can’t get enough of it. Yes, that aspect of e-mail I am so much in love with is Bacn. All of those automated notifications generated by most social networking tools that notify you of new / update content / updates available for you to check out. Those automated notifications that take hardly any space and which you can scan through real quick and click on the handy link(s) available to head over to the real content out on the Web.

I must say that I don’t consider those real e-mails, though, more than anything else because I have got better notification systems, like my good friend Dave Pollard would say, but one thing for sure is that I can’t wait for e-mail to turn itself into a whole new world of Bacn! Can’t wait long enough for it to happen, specially on the Enterprise world!

- e-mail and the younger generation (Gen Y)

Last, but not least, a common topic that I keep bumping into wherever I go and which I would also want to touch base on, even though it will just be a couple of sentences, since I am already working on another much longer blog post where I will expand further on this thought. As most folks I have been interacting with from all over the place in the last few months would know my biggest inspiration for giving up on e-mail at work has actually been the youngest generation of the workforce. Yes, those Gen Yers, who are about to enter the workplace, if not already, and which surely are going to change the way we all interact with one another.

I realise that most folks would not buy into the generational divide and everything, but I must say that I do see the differences in how older & younger generations get to interact in the corporate environment and if there is one thing for sure that I know of is that the younger ones will not use e-mail, if they can avoid it, and in most cases they will! I am sure! Yes, I am talking about that younger generation of knowledge workers who wants to collaborate, share knowledge & connect with other fellow colleagues in real-time, right as they speak and without wasting their time with some other traditional tools that, if anything, just keep slowing things quite a bit! But, like I said, I would be expanding further on this. For now though I would want to leave you with an initial thought which I will recover later on…

Have you ever participated on a PhD thesis from one of these Gen Yers throughout the entire course of the summer, or worked with them actively as summer interns? Have you already been approached by then wanting to have a piece of your knowledge or expertise? Well, if you haven’t, you may want to go ahead and do it. Spend some time with them and you will be able to see the kind of generation that is just about to enter the workforce, if not already! Then you will know why I decided to give up, five months ago, on corporate e-mail as my primary method for knowledge sharing and collaboration.

And, finally, to wrap up some final thoughts I would like to draw your attention into one of the commenters, as I have felt very very identified with most of the stuff he mentioned in his rather long, but very worth it!, commentary available over here. The wise words come from Jonathan B. Spira, CEO, Chief Analyst and founder of Basex, who a couple of weeks back shared a gem or two along these lines:

"E-mail has become a critical tool in the knowledge economy arsenal yet it’s also a subject of derision.

Why?

Because we simply don’t know how to manage our own use of it and how to use it intelligently."

I don’t think I would have been able to put it together in better words than those, to be honest. Now you know why I am moving away from corporate e-mail and into the social computing world

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Transparency, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, New York Times, NYTimes, Balance, Ownership, Responsibility, Time Management, Productivity Tools, Tools, Tacit Knowledge, Explicit Knowledge, Content Management, Content, Social Capital, RSS, Atom, Feed Readers, Bacn, Commoncraft, Social Software in Plain English, Plain English, Dave Pollard, Generational Divide, Generation Y, Gen Y, Gen Yer, Real-Time Collaboration, Online Collaboration, Jonathan Spira, Basex

As I have mentioned in a previous blog post, the purpose of this other entry is to actually cover some additional commentary related to the feedback input that the various readers from the NYTimes article "I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip" have been leaving all along since I got it published a couple of weeks back. You may have noticed how I have already shared a couple of comments there myself, which you can find here and over here, but I thought I would expand on a couple of thoughts that seem to keep coming back over and over again. So without much further ado, let’s go ahead and cover them:

- e-mail vs. social networking interactions - where is the balance?

I know I have been getting plenty of comments in this respect and, while giving presentations at conference events or workshops, it seems to be one of the recurring themes as well over here. Most folks out there would want to know how much time do I spend on online social computing tools collaborating and sharing my knowledge with other fellow knowledge workers, because they all feel that I am spending plenty more time hanging about in them, than processing e-mail.

Well, my answer is always ask back how much time do they spend on e-mail themselves. So far some of the answers I have been receiving have been quite remarkable with people spending up to half a day just processing e-mails. Goodness! Talking about improving your productivity! Not! In my case, and ever since I gave up on corporate e-mail, about five months ago, my involvement with social computing tools has been much heavier and therefore I spend plenty more time than most folks, I am sure. But that has been my choice. My choice to be more productive because I am bringing out the conversations out in the open, public spaces, transparent to everyone and resulting in getting everyone involved at the same level.

I no longer feel comfortable hiding behind e-mail, hoping that no-one will notice, letting it go a week or two, thinking that people would just forget they sent out the e-mail in the first place, and I can move on further with things. I no longer let my responsibility slip away through an e-mail system where e-mails tend to disappear mysteriously , or get deleted accidentally because of a system error or just no longer having a record of the request just because someone had their laptop stolen in their last business trip. Yes, you know what I mean. All of those various excuses we have all learned to master incredibly well just to keep hiding, avoiding our own responsibility to collaborate and share our knowledge with others.  I feel it is about time that we break those barriers and come out to the other side of the fence while people get to interact in an open space where everyone is responsible because of a strong sense of ownership that e-mail just doesn’t cut it. That’s the current working environment that I am an avid advocate of, because that’s the environment that will help me get the job done incredibly faster!

I do realise as well that some folks have been commenting on why I am not producing, as part of the weekly progress report, some statistics on how my social networking interactions have doubled or tripled ever since I stopped using corporate e-mail. To be honest, I looked into it and I am not that much interested just yet. It is far too resource intensive to count the several dozens of interactions I get exposed to on a daily basis and besides it is also beyond the scope of the experiment. I am not trying to compare how e-mail relates to social networking tools as far as productivity is concerned. I just want to STOP using corporate e-mail. Period. And if that means I would need to double or triple my online social computing interactions, then let it be! At least, the conversation is out there in the open and everyone can contribute! Not just me! That’s when we can truly start talking about Collaboration with a capital C.

- e-mail as personal time management productivity tool

For the last few months I have been talking to a whole bunch of folks explaining what I am trying to do with giving up on corporate e-mail and for a good number of weeks it looks like I keep getting the impression that most folks feel I am no longer using e-mail at work because I just couldn’t manage it any longer. Between e-mail and social networking tools I was just doing a very lousy job at time management and getting the job done. Too funny, if you come to think about it, because if you read the various blog posts I have put together on the subject, I never mentioned time management handling e-mail as an issue, specially when in most cases I was getting between 30 to 40 e-mails a day at the highest peak of times, so I am thinking if that is what folks are saying, I am seriously thinking I am working in the wrong industry, because if I cannot handle 30 e-mails a day while managing my time, I guess I should be doing something else.

No, the fact that I gave on e-mail is not because of time management issues, or mail quota, or the infamous "Reply to All" and the Attachments buttons, along with the .cc and .bcc ones, or the political games that you see in specific e-mails where you first need to figure out what the political game is at play before you then decide what to do. No, I didn’t give up on e-mail because of all of that. I eventually gave up on it because e-mail is the worst collaborative tool available out there! I gave up on it because when trying to describe the collaborative process using e-mail you come up with a very realistic example, which Wikinomics picked up not long ago, of how poor it actually is and Chris Rasmussen’s graphic speaks for itself, as I am sure you would be able to agree with:

That is *the* main reason why I have given up on e-mail as a collaboration and knowledge sharing tool, not because of time management issues, nor because I couldn’t handle the load any longer, but because I just wanted to live in heaven (See Wiki Collaboration quadrant above!) while I am sharing my knowledge and collaborating with others. Why would I want to make things much more complex and difficult for myself when collaboration can be *that* easy?!?!

- e-mail as a proof or record of what you do at work

That is perhaps the number one excuse that I keep getting from people I talked to on a regular basis as to why they haven’t given up on work related e-mail just yet. The fact they need to have a proof, a record, of what’s been shared thus far. Well, I am thinking that unless you are in Legal, or HR, or subject to corporate audits for whatever the subject, or in the IP, patents, trademarks, copyright world, there is no reason why you would need to have such a record. And even then most social software tools would still allow you to have that proof or record you have done your job, anyway. Anyone heard of Google (Desktop) Search, amongst many others?

Here is the fundamental aspect though that I think we would all need to reflect on. The main reason why you would want to keep track or proof of an e-mail interaction is, in most cases, because you are lacking enough trust on the other party to respond to you in a timely manner. So you decide to file that e-mail, because you don’t trust the other person at the other end and, you never know, you may need it at some point in time. That’s what e-mail does to you and the interactions you have. We all know why people would keep those records for.

Now, take social networking tools and the interactions you are doing over there. Do you need to have a record of them? In most cases you wouldn’t need to have because the one major key success factor from any successful social network is a strong trust factor. People ask you for help in a social networking tool, and you tend to help out as soon as you possibly can because you trust the other person at the other end. Why? Because you have had an opportunity to make a connection & perhaps even make it an everlasting one! Their online profile is open to everyone, you can see the kind of interactions and reactions he / she has been having and more or less you can build up an opinion of how those conversations are going to take place. Because of that trust, the proof or record of an action does no longer exist. You would just focus on executing the action item and off you go, into the next one!

You are part of the network, a group of individuals who have been building enough rapport to share with everyone what they can expect. This is exactly the kind of environment I have been exposed to all along. I used to archive every single e-mail I used to get, just in case I may need it at a later time. It turns out that I am using social software tools much much heavier and have found out I no longer need to record stuff. I just focus on getting the job done with the folks I trust, instead of wasting everyone’s time escalating an e-mail after another.

Oh, and here is an open question to everyone to reflect some more on the topic, have you ever thought that when documenting something, whether it is on e-mail or any other traditional collaborative tool, you start putting together some thoughts and by the time you are done and ready to click on the SAVE or PUBLISH button the content is already out of date? Even before anyone else may have seen it? Even before you feel it is ready? Well, that’s the new reality of the corporate world of the 21st century:

Content is no longer key!

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Transparency, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, New York Times, NYTimes, Balance, Ownership, Responsibility, Time Management, Productivity Tools, Tools, Wikinomics, Chris Rasmussen, Audits, Trust, Tacit Knowledge, Explicit Knowledge, Content Management, Content, Social Capital