Email is Alive
In 2007 Information Week ran a story suggesting a generational communications gap — ‘email is for old people, as outdated as a leisure suit’. As an example they pointed out that after campus shootings at Virginia Tech university officials were criticized for slow communications response and urged to adopt a faster alert system like instant messaging.
Only today I watched a twitter tutorial on YouTube called “8 Reasons Why Email is Dying”. Amongst the hyperbole we find the very twitter statement that “Real life happens between blog posts and emails”.
Sandwiched between these two arguments is the assertion email is in some way dying. But despite this regular stream of obituaries email has never been stronger and we believe reports of it’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
Forrester Research suggest email will continue to grow by raw volume to 840 billion by 2013. From where we stand email is more deeply embedded into government, corporate and organizational workflows than ever before. You only have to get caught up in PCI compliance to find out how many emails carry credit card numbers, purchase orders and other key business information.
The failure of Google Wave to make any impact on email is another sign of the health of the eco system. Sure social media are growing fast, but it’s hard to find any impact outside of the personal social space. Unless you count entertainment as a business and what Ashton Kutcher had for breakfast as earth shaking. Rather I would suggest the reverse is true, in that social media remain side-lined in the corporate world, who really struggle to find a use for it outside of being a marketing trumpet.
The oft leveled criticism of spam and malware obtain a lot of press inches, but remain at manageable levels almost all of the time.
What we see happening isn’t the demise of email; quite the opposite. There is much room to optimize email into business processes much more. Email is a vast gold mine of quality data for organizations of all levels. Imagine, for example, being able to reorder email inside your Outlook, so your emails were glued together into a chronological listing of every email related to a particular issue. Like a conversation thread from start to finish covering a single contract , negotiation or issue of your choosing. Imagine being the team leader and able to simply browse a thread at the end of a day to see what additions were made from the team. All using your current email client and server infrastructure.
These types of technologies are coming and they won’t kill email, they will make is more useful, more valuable and easier to leverage the value email really has.
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