The future of mail is social: New thinking from IDC

Quelle:  SocialBusiness Insights Blog / 

As I was preparing this post about a new IDC Report, "The Future of Mail is Social", I realize I've already shared quite a bit of what IBM means when we say "the future of mail is social":   The many sessions at Lotusphere as well as previous posts:  Thinking Outside the Inbox, the follow-up post, my SlideShare presentations on the Future of Mail and more.

 Part of this extensive dialog, of course, is that for IBM it's never been "just" about email - just as Lotus Notes was never "just" an email application. Witness the hundreds of thousands of business-critical Lotus Domino applications and Lotus Notes' deep integration with those and other collaboration tools. Customers have every expectation that we will continue to support and innovate this product area.  And we want our customers to feel like they made a good decision when they chose IBM (thanks!).

 But a bigger part of it is that the business and IT community are very much looking for a different way to do things. IT, power users, influencers, executives -- all are trying to "think outside the inbox". What is the solution to this deluge of professional and personal email that I can't effectively manage anymore? What's the role of email in the context of the broader collaboration "portfolio" we need as successful businesses and professionals? Most importantly: what is the business and professional value from all this collaborating?

 IDC has written extensively about collaboration for many years, so we felt that asking for their independent viewpoint on where THEY think email is going could help our customers answer some of these questions. The result: a new report, IDC: The Future of Mail is Social, Document #232546, February 2012 (free registration is required).

 Here's just a teaser:

 "Rather than envision "a world without email," [this report] reveals a future where email converges with social tools and grows into an innovative hybrid productivity tool to help support the new collaborative enterprise."

 As with many other things in life ( chocolate, blueperry pie, relaxing in front of the television ), too much of a wonderful thing quickly becomes a bad thing. That's the case with email. It's been so good at what it does best -- 1-to-1 rapid communications -- we've stretched it beyond recognition to our own detriment:

•  We've used it as our de facto Knowledge Management repository
•  We've used it as a default project management tool
•  With mobile and high-speed access we're pretending it's a rich-media walkie-talkie
•  We've asked it to be our bullhorn for advertising and marketing and selling
•  We've even invented words like spam and bacon to describe different kinds of email. I suppose it's no different than the Saami needed to develop dozens of words to describe different kinds of snow in order to survive.

 As a result, many users feel like they're drowning in a waterfall of their own making.

 This is absolutely and directly related to what it means to be a social business. For businesses have always been social -- HUMAN -- enterprises. And as social animals, people have always used tools -- old and new -- in all their enterprises to more effectively collaborate. Newer technology is enabling us to think differently about how we collaborate, not just using new tools but using existing tools differently. And, perhaps as importantly, existing tools help orient us and point the way to adapting to, and adopting, newer tools as well. It's an evolution, not a revolution: an additive, not subtractive, equation of human endeavor.

 This paper, then, is just another step in thinking about that evolution: how we use email today, how we should think about using it tomorrow, how it can help us to adopt newer tools while keeping what it does best.

 As always, what do you think? How are you handling (or not handling) your inbox today? What would your ideal inbox of tomorrow look like?