e-mail still the preferred tool of mass collaboration

Ross Mayfield, CEO and founder of Socialtext, is big on Wikis … in fact he thinks that every organisation needs at least one, much as everyone needs email.

It still amazes me that after all these years, email is still cited as the number one killer application on the internet. Mayfield says;

“For a long time, personal productivity tools and applications – the kind Microsoft makes – have been centred on a single user who generates documents. You also have highly structured enterprise systems designed and implemented from the top down – in many ways as an instrument of control – with rigid work flow, business rules, and ontologies that users must fit themselves into. The problem is that users don’t like using those kinds of tools, and what they end up doing is trying to circumvent them. That’s why ninety percent of collaboration exists in e-mails.”

Mayfield goes on to claim that the average Fortune 1,000 employee spends four hours a day in their in-box and that organisations have reached a point where e-mail is “breaking down” with only 10-20% of email time being productive time.

I think that there’s definitely some truth in the above, in my experience e-mail in the enterprise is overused as a tool of collaboration and document exchange.  I think the issue with wikis, though, is getting the momentum behind it.  E-mail works because everyone is on it.  Similarly with a wiki, if it’s going to work.  Check this post for some idea on the numbers.