The world after email is on its way

It’s clear from the habits of our undergraduates that young people have moved on from email, or have never adopted it in the first place. Teenagers think that email is middle aged and, of course, they cannot conceive of a world without email, instant messaging (IM) or mobile phones at all.

Now the hi-tech services company Atos has announced that it is phasing out email over the next 18 months. Email will go the way of the smoke signal, letter, telex and fax. According to The Independent, Atos will be moving to other tools, including IM, wikis and social networking, including a business-based social networking service called Yammer. The idea is partly to reduce the time spent on useless emails – spam, marketing emails, emails copied to everyone just to cover backs, etc. It is a disruptive, intrusive, demanding medium. Most us aren’t much better at ignoring incoming mail than we at ignoring a ringing phone.


I’m hardly an early adopter of new methods and I quite like email so I have no particular wish to ditch it. Nevertheless there is another purpose of the Atos change which is more interesting to me, particularly as we work further on our online materials for the Executive MBA course. Atos is looking to shift the emphasis of their communication to more collaborative tools. Email isn’t collaborative. At best it can be co-operative with individuals successively adding ideas or information to a conversation.

Collaboration is rather different, a process weaving together the different contributions into one complete whole where the individual elements are no longer visible. Wikis, for example, are collaborative. They can be a group, “teamy” activity in the same way as a meeting is. That’s not to say that they are always collaborative and “teamy” just as not all meetings are. The key though is that they can be a tool to aid the exchange of ideas and to facilitate the construction of ideas, with one idea building on another and creating something else as people work together either live or sequentially.

The University doesn’t use wikis very much between staff although we do use them as a learning tool. I for one am a bit behind current practice in business when it comes to my own working methods. I see wikis as useful learning tools but that’s not the only point. They are also an important part of business courses because they are useful tools in business.

So, I have signed up for a Yammer account this morning and have created an MBA group and another for a specific task I am working on now with three colleagues from other faculties. So far (all of a couple of hours into this experience) I like it. We’ll see. At the very least, it will provide a topic for another blog post in a few weeks!

About the Author: Elizabeth Parkin
Elizabeth had a 25 year career in management before joining the University seven years ago as Manager for “Pod” Programmes. She also held the post of MBA Academic Director before moving on to becoming Head of Department for Management and Business Systems.