Time to move on beyond email

If a technology executive has to hear "do more with less" one more time, we may have a mass revolt on our hands. Businesses today face a host of conflicting pressures. Declining revenues are forcing organisations to contain expenses, yet demands from customers, employees, and regulators continue to escalate.

The notion of "do more with less" has been tried and, while it has achieved some results, businesses have reached a point where they now need to do some things differently. One solution that seems to be the elusive holy grail of IT management is to create a better connected global business. Ideally, this is done by sharing existing processes and technologies, making it possible to respond to growing cost pressures and customer demands. Why are businesses slow to adopt a collaborative working environment that can unleash the power of the information within an organisation?

A recent Forrester report claims that 49 per cent of IT chiefs indicate that implementing a collaboration strategy is a priority or critical priority. But what are the other 51 per cent planning to do? Are they really happy to be left behind?

Your employees will have a cornucopia of productivity tools at their disposal. Taking a cue from micro-blogs, many are using email less and less to exchange documents and ideas, but instead using it for short and snappy one-liners and as a means to receive updates from the various collaborative systems that connect them to their co-workers and customers.

Collaboration tools are vital to an organisation's success. We can no longer rely on the old ways of doing things - and by old I mean email. Web browser-based environments where teams and customers can exchange documents, ideas and criticisms are already here and are just going to become more proliferated. Some of the most creative and successful work is done by teams that can share information across organisations and break out of their regional or structural silo.

I recently read about how FedEx's IT group banded together with the firm's customer service organisation to put the first package tracker on FedEx.com. They took this monumental first step towards online customer service by ignoring the old way of working and choosing instead to collaborate across platforms with existing technology and resources.

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