I haven’t been excited by a news bulletin in so long. No, I am not talking about the prospect of Gingrich debating Obama (THAT would be a debate), the resurgence of the Clippers (The other better Lakers) or the forthcoming NY vs Boston Superbowl commercials extravaganza of almost $4 million for a 30 seconds spot (probably less during the Madonna half time show, but that’s just an educated guess…).
So no, the major news that is getting me giddy is that FINALLY a large corporation is stopping the insanity of emails. The tyranny of emails has been a pet peeve of mine and a significant tenet of C3.0 workshops and consulting to companies for several years now. There is a reason Blackberry is number one in Indonesia. Or maybe your epiphany will come after every single one of your younger employees and newest hires keep starring at you blankly when you tell them your company use Outlook. Out what? They never used it until they step foot in your organization.
The company I am talking about is Atos, one of the World’s largest IT Services company with almost 80,000 employees scattered in 42 countries and sales over $10 Billion. Its CEO and fellow Frenchman, Thierry Breton, noticed like every other executive that not only younger workers were not using emails, but that after studying the 100 daily internal emails the average Atos employee receive, only 15% turn out to be actually useful. However, because employees fear missing something important, they spend about 15 to 20 hours a week, from work and home combined, working on those 100 daily internal emails.
His solution is to phase out internal emails over a three-year period, vowing to totally eradicate them by February 2014 when every single Atos employee will be using a mix of cloud computing environment and internal social networks expressed via instant messaging, micro blogging, document sharing in order to truly develop a real-time knowledge community. Five hundred test employees are already internal email free, and they are now ready to go company wide.
And yes, Athos employees will still be using email to communicate outside of the organization, with clients, vendors…That is until the rest of the world catch-up. It wont be as long as one might think. Athos hire about 10,000 new employees every year, the vast majority under 30, and almost all of them ready to work internal email free from the get go.
