Opinion | Is the email yesterday’s work communications tool?
The battle is on among tech firms to dominate the enterprise communications sector, estimated at US $10 billion a year
It’s a dreaded word that we often hear in offices in Hong Kong, and indeed around the world – email.
Some workers like to play a competition after they return from holiday, and compete for the largest inbox.
The first working email system in 1971 and the first message – “QWERTY” – have since created a deluge of messages, which has turned email into a villain at work. This in turn has spawned a set of enterprise tools to deal with it. Alas, many of current set of enterprise tools are poorly suited to this changing world of work.
More than 30 years after its introduction, email remains the dominant form of enterprise communication. When it was first introduced, email replaced the phone (which required two people to be available at the same time) and allowed people in organisations to communicate and collaborate asynchronously.
Ubiquitous and convenient email has now become a major impediment to enterprise productivity. The average user receives or sent 125 emails and the average worker in the US spends 30 hours a week checking email.
This might be fine if emails allowed people to work effectively, but it is increasingly not the case. Email is a one to one (or one to a few) form of communication – meaning that it is difficult to share and spread across the organisation. It’s also poorly integrated with other enterprise systems and tools. When someone emails you a document to edit you need to jump out to another software to update it.