The articles continue to pile up; all suggesting that e-mail is either dying or dead.
It reminds me of a bit comedian Bill Cosby used to do: “I keep overhearing my teen daughters telling my wife: ‘Mother, it’s my life. Your life is over.’ The first time I heard that, I went upstairs and packed. I don’t want to live with no woman whose life is over.”
And packing is exactly what some companies like the LAC Group and Atos are doing. Both have launched very public missions to completely rid their organizations of e-mail. No sense in living with a tool that’s doomed for failure.
Except, it’s not.
When it comes to getting the job done, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce Chatter, and Yammer—just to name a few—certainly play an important role. But so does the 140 year-old telephone. Sure, today’s phones have evolved to meet modern day needs just as e-mail has and will continue to evolve. Social networks aren’t replacing the telephone, IM, texting, e-mail or in-person conversations. They’re growing alongside these communication methods.
In fact, as the use of social media and other technologies—particularly mobile—grow, e-mail too will grow. The Radicati Group expects the number of worldwide e-mail accounts to jump from 3.3 billion in 2012 to 4.3 billion in 2016. And for all the talk of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ replacing e-mail, they all include e-mail-like messaging capabilities.
What happens when the phones go down for a day? Business lives on. Take away social media, business continues on. But what about when we can’t send or receive e-mails? Business grinds to a halt. Departments are paralyzed. The entire enterprise stops, because e-mail is more than spam and a bunch of water cooler missives. Take it away, and not only are you impeding person-to-person communication, you’re completely shutting down system-to-system and system-to-person communication. E-mail is even used to control both government and commercial satellite repositioning. You can’t replace this with Twitter.
Of course, e-mail isn’t without its faults. Reduction of clutter, for one, is a good thing. Not just in terms of spam and frivolous e-mail, but on all platforms. Social media platforms also generate a lot of noise, and there is a fatigue associated with its post-to-all mentality. Keeping up with all the ideas—some good, some not so good—takes time. And enterprise tools such as Salesforce Chatter are commonly experiencing drop-off as a result.
As Altimeter Group analyst Charlene Li wrote in a recent report, “Some organizations have deployed social networking features with an initial enthusiastic reception, only to see these early efforts wither to just a few stalwart participants.”
E-mail isn’t dying. It’s bigger than ever. Does e-mail—rather, the 25-year-old infrastructure most organizations rely on to handle it—need to be modernized? Yes. Fortunately, this is already happening within the largest organizations, and other businesses are sure to follow—not out of some noble desire to save it, but because in reality business’ reliance on it is growing, not shrinking.