A Social Enterprise Becomes a Reality

The Social Enterprise Becomes A Reality - Forbes

Interesting quote here:

"Atos, a 70,000 employee IT services firm based in France, has committed to eliminating all internal email by 2014 in favor of social technologies. The CEO claims that only 15 percent of their internal email was useful and the rest contributed to lost time".

I brought this up a few months back and now it looks like at least one company is driving an intiative to eliminate email.

I found this extremely interesting and exciting. Change can be awesome, I'm interested to see how this may effect the future.

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Comments

DevilWAH

I think until there is a standard social technology things like this will be limiting. Internal is possible but then how does that tie in when you go external, having to move data from your internal social media to.. well email I guess.

What would be nice is for the big social players, like Google, face book, link, etc. to produce standards to allow them to talk to each, much like MSN messenger and Yahoo messenger did a few years back.

Then not only would social technologies be used inside organisation but also between them.

N2IT

I agree with communication, but there are data transferring solutions besides emails. The company I currently work for doesn't allow a lot of file types to be transmitted via email. You have to use a dropbox/ftp system.

I do agree once/if these companies come together you could see a major communcation change for the future. I bet someone is working on this solution at this very moment. The use of middleware or some integration component could be developed 3rd party to allow these applications to communicate with each other.

YFZblu

•In 2010 Corporate users received some 200 mails per day, 18% of which were spam

This sounds rather high. 36 spam emails a day.

Also: If it's not email, corporate employees will find other ways to communicate with each other in ways that is not 'useful'. I don't think the loss of email will suddenly spike productivity - and it could certainly hinder productivity initially as people get used to the new way of life. Interesting to see what happens there.

N2IT

@ YFZ

The CEO didn't indicate it was spam, the CEO said useful. I get a lot of emails that aren't spam, but aren't useful either. A LOT

Besides I like the idea of transparency with communications. Email is very shielded and blocked off, with social media the communication itself is transparent for everyone to see. A lot of companies have taken the transparency approach from the business side. So why not align your communication channels to synch up with this model?

YFZblu

N2IT wrote: »

@ YFZ

The CEO didn't indicate it was spam, the CEO said useful. I get a lot of emails that aren't spam, but aren't useful either. A LOT

Besides I like the idea of transparency with communications. Email is very shielded and blocked off, with social media the communication itself is transparent for everyone to see. A lot of companies have taken the transparency approach from the business side. So why not align your communication channels to synch up with this model?

I never said the CEO said the email was spam - I was quoting the original article about the French company. The article states that in 2010 18% of corporate email was spam - What filter are these companies using?? Sounds more like the Yahoo email account I use for junk registrations.

Regarding transparency - I highly doubt the low hanging fruit will have unbridled access to all sectors of the communication. I would think access restrictions will be in place.

DevilWAH

Did any one see the Google Wave experment?

that was a instresting idea that i enjoyed playing with. real time colabration, email like interface, but using a conversation (wave) which gave a much nicer flow to communication.

I see this kind of idea as the way business will end up communication.

N2IT

YFZblu wrote: »

I never said the CEO said the email was spam - I was quoting the original article about the French company. The article states that in 2010 18% of corporate email was spam - What filter are these companies using?? Sounds more like the Yahoo email account I use for junk registrations.

Regarding transparency - I highly doubt the low hanging fruit will have unbridled access to all sectors of the communication. I would think access restrictions will be in place.

Regardless the point made about productivity was made around that 15% of their internal email was considered useful. That is the driving data element regarding this company and their strategy to remove email.

Of course transparency will be limited, but from a top down view it should be opened up more. Senior leadership can then leverage these communication channels/tools. As long as consolidation takes place within these tools sets senior leadership would get a better pulse of the company and be able to hear the voice of the employee. This has been the model a lot of successful companies have been trying to move towards.

IMO Companies that are creating outlets for employees to express their ideas and concerns is a critical piece moving forward. Enterprised social media could be the medium in which this strategy would be designed and executed on.

N2IT

@DevilWAH

You have peaked my interest. Do you have any information related to the Wave Project?

I will Google as well, but if you have something already lined up please post. Thanks

QHalo

Email is how I CYA, how does that work now? Tracking of conversations is important.

DevilWAH

IT came, I played, they ended it

google wave demo -- Email+IM - YouTube

maybe wone day they will retry it

demonfurbie

from a legal point of view:

email can be stored, archives, traced, and verified

lawyers have to archive there email for the last 7 years and be able to access that at any time ... every email .... EVERY EMAIL yes even the stupid ones like

subject: lol
yo tom i saw <insert stupid pic> just thought id share

YFZblu

demonfurbie wrote: »

from a legal point of view:

email can be stored, archives, traced, and verified

lawyers have to archive there email for the last 7 years and be able to access that at any time ... every email .... EVERY EMAIL yes even the stupid ones like

subject: lol
yo tom i saw <insert stupid pic> just thought id share

Yep - Which is why I think this type of culture should be integrated alongside email, not in place of email; and not as a way to bolster productivity - In the end, employees will always find ways to waste time...Not to mention that employess will have to retrain on the culture, and the mere notion that your employer removed email because it wasn't used properly seems like a punishment more than anything. At least from the perspective of the users.

Everyone

Glad I didn't end up working for them. I interviewed with Siemens IT Solutions and Services last year while they were in the middle of being acquired be Atos. The interview process stopped dead in its tracks the day Atos acquired them, and I never heard anything again after that.

@demonfurbie The same thing can be done with Instant Messaging. The article even mentions "Office Communicator" as an alternative they will be using. Obviously OCS is now Lync.

IM has become pretty common in the Enterprise. It is very useful, but it is not an e-mail replacement.

When IM isn't used (or its proper use isn't encouraged) at an organization, people tend to try to use e-mail as IM, and that isn't what e-mail is for.

"Social Networking" websites are not e-mail replacements either. "Private" messages on any Social Networking site are nothing more than IM + E-mail.

You can't just "get rid of e-mail". That's a bit like saying "My right hand hurts, guess I need to cut it off". It isn't the right way to address the real problem.

Too much spam? Time to re-think your anti-spam strategy.

Too much useless e-mail? Time to re-think your acceptable use policy.

People trying to use e-mail for more than it was intended for? Time to expand your collaboration suite.

Where I work, we have e-mail, we have instant messaging, and we have an internal "Social Network". They all work together. The social networking site is actually pretty neat. It ties in with Lync for presence, ties in with Exchange for free/busy data, ties into Sharepoint for sharing files and documents. It has profiles, different news feeds (default is a company wide newsfeed). I can open an IM or send an e-mail to someone directly from their profile page. Plus a ton more.

ptilsen

We've tried to implement partial email replacements. We use SocialCast and Lync. Both are nice, but at the end of the day email has its place.

N2IT

@ Everyone

We have a similiar set up that we currently use. I love the use of forums and other types of social media platforms. It's great for colloboration in a enterprise setting. Anyone who is interested in that group applies and then gets accepted, usually. A lot of great ideas come out of the forum.

Right now it seems Outlook has hit its ceiling. People are using the calendar way to much and there are to many limitations on the client. The cost to support Outlook is expensive if you look at the overall quantity of tickets. Does Microsoft offer a better calendar solution other than Outlook? The email portion of Outlook is great, but the calendar and meeting piece has been nothing short of a nightmare.

Permission issues arise out of the blue, you have people who are delegates not able to send on behalf even though the permissions are set up correctly. To me Outlook has become a very unstable and questionable when dealing with delegate and calendar.

Hopefully some hotfixes come out to help offset the decreased reliability.

Everyone

Outlook isn't a Calendaring solution, it is a client.

Calendaring in Outlook 2010 + Exchange 2010 is great. I've experienced the pains of co-existence with Outlook 2003 + Exchange 2003 + Outlook 2010 + Exchange 2010. There are fixes out there. The quicker you can get to a pure Outlook 2010 + Exchange 2010 environment, the easier it is.

SharePoint integration with Exchange can provide some great shared and/or public calendar features beyond (or maybe just different) what you get in Outlook.

I'm actually in the process of setting up an Exchange 2010 server on my home network so my family can have a shared calendar. Paper calendar on the fridge just isn't cutting it anymore. Once I get this setup, I'll configure my wife's phone to access it, so she can get reminders. I'll put my business trips on it so she'll know when I'll be gone, and when I'll be home. We'll put our kids school events on it, doctors appointments, and stuff like that too. Plus I plan to put recurring appointments for chores.

N2IT

@ Phoeneous exchange 03 and 10 and client 03, 07 (very few), 2010

@ Everyone I know I know

Either way dual environments are COSTLY and are just terrible to deal with. I'll admit the users push Outlook/Exchange that's for sure. The permission issue between 03 and 10 is just a nightmare and is the bulk of the problems.

Here are some issues:

*Delegates creating meetings on behalf of their boss etc and the delegate appearing as the organizer
*User creates a meeting single occurance or reoccuring and looks like the meeting invite goes through and what ends up happening is you get an operation failed error. The organizer doesn't get the meeting however any resource assigned in the meeting get the update
*Emails sent from Rich Text 2003 to 2010 HTML has problems with links sometimes. Users are forced to switch from RIch Text to HTML sometimes to follow the hyperlinking in the body of the email

Like I said earlier the email portion is fine, but the permission and the calendar has been brutal to be honest.

I would consider big bang over rolling wave or phase if you environment is capable of it.

ptilsen

N2, Outlook is very much an example of planned obsolescence. I think Microsoft made implementation of mixed environments difficult on purpose.

With that in mind, Outlook/Exchange IMO is just fine as long as you aren't mixing versions. Ultimately, single-version Outlook/Exchange environments are great and should not have permissions issues. I certainly don't have problems with calendaring in the environments I've implemented that are pure 2007/2010. Personally, I wish all calendaring integrated with Outlook. Gmail, Yahoo, and Facebook, just to name a few, would ultimately be better if I could use them with Outlook.

As I look through our ticketing system, it looks like of over 100K tickets over the last five years, about 4500 have been for email related issues, meaning everything from new email setup to Outlook problems to Exchange outages. I don't have a good way to differentiate Outlook problems from other tickets (don't get me started), but I would feel confident in saying no more than 10% of the tickets are for Outlook problems, and more than 50% of them are duplicates or new user setups. That puts us at a few hundred Outlook problems out of over 100K tickets. Personally, I feel like that is pretty good.

But these are for separate SMB environments almost always running one version of Outlook, usually matched to the corresponding Exchange version. There are a couple of mismatched Exchange/Outlook environments, but most use either Office 2003 or Office 2007/2010, without many mixed environments. Given my experience, I really think your Outlook problems are due to running a mixed environment. YMMV, but Exchange and Outlook have largely been enjoyable to support and implement in my career, and I continue to recommend Outlook for calendaring in particular.