French web site 01net.com published yesterday an article interviewing Thierry Breton, politician, ex-Chairman & CEO of France Telecom and current CEO of Atos Origin. M. Breton claims he wants to eradicate email within his organization, and use Instant Messaging exclusively. The article named ‘Atos Origin toward zero inbox in the company‘ (article in french) indicates CEO Thierry Breton intends to get rid of all internal emails within 3 years.
M. Breton believes email is obsolete in the corporate world because his employees already stopped using email in their personal lives, preferring Web 2.0 platforms. He asks: ‘Why is Instant Messaging so much better? Because people can see if you’re online. They will ask a question to which you will answer immediately’.
The company, Atos Origin, is an IT Service Provider. For such a company, IM is the worst form of communication.
Unless it’s part of your job description to be infinitely interruptable, it’s a total productivity killer. Programmers, Techs, IT all need to concentrate and can not afford losing time getting in and out of the ‘zone’ (recent studies show a single phone call takes away 45 minutes of productivity in these types of resources). Oh, and these guys are most likely the core of Atos’ workforce.
Furthermore, IM leaves no room to prioritization. People are not multi-taskers. They do task switching and there’s an overhead everytime they switch from task A to task B.
How about traceability and archiving? It’s hard enough to locate a specific email among the thousands archived in your inbox. How will they achieve this with IM?
Really, I just wanted to wish him Good Luck. I’m sure they will need it.
Very good points Damien. I recall reading that article and thinking that email still has a long life in the enterprise.
Come to think of it, if someone added to Instant Messaging all the features it would need in order for it to be a complete and useful enterprise tool, it would become one of two things: email, or the telephone.
IM has a role to play in the enterprise, no doubt. But replace email or other forms of communication? I doubt it.
Can’t wait to read the comments on this one.
We added IM to our mail sever (IceWarp) about a 5 years ago – primary for internal communication, because it is much more efefctive and secure (no spams, etc.) However you DO NEED EMAIL too – it is given by communication type, attachments, necessarity for CC etc. The best solution is integrated system, where you have IM & Mail and cross-features as IM->Mail and searchable archive.
@Ladislav:
At work, we are also running both Instant Message (Spark) and Email. And no way IM-only could work out. I wouldn’t be able to get 5 consecutive minutes of work done.
I totally agree with your points about IM and its advantages and limitations.
You mention spam in email. I’m curious, are you talking about real spam? Or were you referring to what we call Bacn? (not spam, and not legit, just noise). From what I can see on your company’s product web page, IceWarp, it uses SpamAssassin and another engine for anti-spam filtering. Can the IM part of your mail server be installed separately (for example, on Exchange) ?
More news on M. Breton and his plans to ban email:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8921033/Staff-to-be-banned-from-sending-emails.html