Some of the larger offices in parts of the world want email to completely go away, such as the CEO of Atos who absolutely wants a zero-email policy implemented. The linked article states that at that company, only 10% of the messages are "useful", way too much time is spent going through hundreds of messages, and that a SMS/forum/instant-message system would be better suited.

It won’t work. Why? It won’t solve the useless message problem. Can you imagine getting 50 to 100 texts a day (all from different people, mind you) instead of emails? Which one do you think would be easier to manage?

In the office, the best way to handle deluges of electronic communications is by better message management; this has absolutely nothing to do with technology but rather the use of it.

The best example of how better message management works is by looking at any well-run technical support portion of a corporation. Yes, I’m talking about the "help desk", where there are farms of bland cubicles as far as the eye can see.

Proper support areas utilize three forms of electronic communication, that being an in-house ticket system, instant messaging and email.

The ticket system is purposely in-house for security reasons and is used to support the customer, keep a history of customer support requests and make for easy delegation if assignments/reassignments need to be made.

Instant messaging is invaluable at the support desk for employee-to-employee communications and eliminates a ton of useless emails. An example of interoffice IM’ing is Lotus Sametime.

Email is for everything else the ticket system and IM’ing doesn’t cover.

Any corporation that uses email as its primary means of support is just being plain stupid, because believe me, without a ticket system, everything ends up in disconnected chaos.

Any corporation that doesn’t have some means of instant messaging for large departments is also being stupid, because that leads to useless emails aplenty. Where an IM solution doesn’t exist, many will in fact use their personal cell phones for SMS texts just to break out of the sea of useless messages and keep communications flowing properly. Is this against corporate policy? Usually that’s a yes, but employees don’t care because they will use whatever is available to get the job done.

Eliminating email from an office doesn’t solve anything. Better electronic messaging policies on the other hand can work wonders, and you don’t have to change any of the technologies.

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