Slashdot Mirror
Europe's Largest IT Company To Ban Internal Email
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, Europe's Largest IT Company, wants a 'zero email' policy to be in place in 18 months, arguing that only 10 per cent of the 200 electronic messages his employees receive per day on average turn out to be useful, and that staff spend between 5-20 hours handling emails every week. 'The email is no longer the appropriate (communication) tool,' says Breton. 'The deluge of information will be one of the most important problems a company will have to face (in the future). It is time to think differently.' Instead Breton wants staff at Atos to use chat-type collaborative services inspired by social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter as surveys show that the younger generation have already all but scrapped email, with only 11 per cent of 11 to 19 year-olds using it. For his part Breton hasn't sent a work email in three years. 'If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word.'"
No one wants to use email anymore. When I talk with clients, one of the first things they ask for is do I have Skype, ICQ or MSN. For business stuff, Skype is the clear winner. I talk with clients and managers there. It has a clear advantage too, as you get instant answer and can actually discuss things in real time. Everything goes easier that way.
For friends and personal things, it's also only Facebook, Steam and MSN for me. It would feel weird to send email to them, and they probably wouldn't read it anyway. Email is kind of like sending a letter, but in this case it also loses its charm and personal feel. It might been relevant still up to 2005, but now it's all the way Facebook, IM or you know, actually calling someone. I can't say I really miss email either. I still have to use one to receive registration verifications and or some news and stuff like that, but there's nothing personal in email anymore.
I agree that most emails are useless (starting from those which are sent just FYI, but are still distracting and interrupting the workflow).
However, if there is one thing I learnt by working in a megacorporation, is that _everything_ has to be in writing at some point.
So many times a colleague or supplier will say "sure, we'll do that no problem" and then weeks go by, without anyone remembering.
For accountability, email is still the way to go.
I work IT and my company could not survive without email. All of our orders from customers and orders to vendors go through email. We have to attach PDF and word documents too. How am I going to do that with text messaging? Email is the most useful and important IT function we have.
It stops all those pesky logs and evidence of such things ;)
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
If someone is interested in penis enlargement, a russian girlfriend or the money of an endangered african heir, how will that person be informed without email?
They send me and email, and it turns up on my phone!
TADA! Supprise!
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
"Sir, people are using our communication tool for unproductive social activities."
"Quickly, build an internal system which is modelled after even less productive, more overtly social software."
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This whole IM thing is no different than a phone call. Some communication requires careful thought and so is best written down so you can think about a response. Email is the perfect medium for such communication. Facebook is a general post to anyone who might read it. When you need a private, considered opinion, email is the way. Or am I now too old to 'get' facebook or twitter? They both seem pointless to me. In fact, moving your employees towards them would seem to be a drain on productivity if nothing else.
This would be the CTO of a company renowned (in the UK at least) for its involvement in a huge number of abortive public sector IT projects. I very much doubt that Breton has much input into those projects though, as Atos is a huge company. He probably does what most executives of his calibre do, and attend pointless senior managment meetings, generally in nice locations with dinner and drink laid on. That's when he isn't schmoozing for more work, a task that generally involves more dinner and drink, all paid for out of the company kitty.
The spoken word will not replace the written word.
Also, some of us have more to say than 128 characters at a time.
So people are receiving lots of emails, of which 90% are useless, and this guy decides the solution is to switch from emails to 'chat-type' services. So now you've got lots of chat messages, of which 90% are useless. Problem solved?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Email is consistent and can be secured. IM, twitter, facebook, skype all require remote accounts. This sounds like another spoiled boss that doesn't know shit about security.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I prefer email for communicating with friends outside of real life.
I like the asynchronous nature of email. I send email when I don't need an immediate reply, and presume the recipient will reply at their convenience. MSN style chat demands instant replies, and at that point I'd rather actually speak to the person. I also like having an archive that's easily searchable, to the extent that I have an app on my phone that forwards SMS messages to email (handy for cut and paste when someone texts directions, for example).
At work, it's worse as we have a culture whereby someone will email you and then follow up five minutes later with a call asking if you got their email if you haven't responded... totally negates the benefit of email.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
When it comes to useful communication, talking is usually one of the most inefficient and ineffective ways to get real work done. Whatever slight advantage might come from the realtime aspect of it is immediately lost several times over due to the lack of any history being retained. This makes it far more difficult to refer back to it later, to share it with others, and to search through large volumes of it.
In most businesses, those people doing the real bulk of the work tend to prefer written communication. It's just a far more efficient way to work. In turn, those who prefer verbal communication are usually those who do the least real work. They're the ones who sit in meetings or phone calls all day "planning" or "discussing strategy" or otherwise not doing anything useful.
That alone will cut out most of the personal email.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The title looks like an excerpt from slashdot article, cca 2014
EMail has qualities that no other means will ever have: it can be archived, you can search for information in it, and the conversations are logically organized. Good luck to the manager, I think he will need it, soon
Really? 9 months after it was announced it shows up in Slashdot? http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2011/02/10/economia/1297339319.html
So you are trying to claim email - which you can ignore until it's convenient for you to deal with - interrupts your workflow but the IM, telephone calls etc which require you to respnd immediately don't?
You and Thierry have something in common: you're both idiots.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
20 a day are useful!
And sometimes email is the most convenient medium. Maybe you could have some sort of shared feed, but if you want to send something to a single person, that's just email with the serial numbers filed off.
No more lolcats in my inbox? I has a sad.
I write professional videogame reviews! http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/
I work almost entirely in email. I hate talking on phones. I hate ringing people. I hate being called.
The phone is so intrusive, it's like the person doing the calling has no care about what the person being called is doing, they think they are the most important thing ever and you should be sitting there just waiting for their call. Telephoning somebody, to me, is like walking up and interrupting the other party when they are in a conversation with somebody else.
Email by contrast is fundamentally polite and efficient, you send the message and when it is convenient for the other end, they reply.
The same problems that phones have also apply to other forms of "instant" messaging.
Most people have no trouble working over email, the few who do I generally find either have some disability (dyslexia), or are just plain demanding and really do believe that they are the most important person and can't understand why you won't spend hour upon hour on the phone listening to their inane drivel (and woe betide you should bill them for it).
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
So longs as their chat server supports: retention, filing/tagging, search, prioritization, attachments, read/unread, synchronous, asynchronous, out-of-office, calendar integration, 'invisible' status, multi-device access, forwarding, delegation, filtering rules, spam blockers, mailing lists with digests, and a couple of dozen more vital features then it will be a great leap forward.
SMTP may be a bit of a silly protocol for an untrusted network but internally it is near perfect. Anyway chucking IMAP and all the rest of our email infrastructure out with the bathwater is just silly.
This is so sad. It's a symptom of a much greater problem: We are reaping the latest crop that was sown by modern education.
The little Johnys and Janes are barely literate. Composing even the simplest prose (to answer an email or any other written communication) just takes too long for the average person entering the workforce today.
Should I also lose all of my social skills, stop bathing and whine about how my parents don't understand me.
The youth unemployment rate is at an all time high wheras the unemployment rate for my, email using, demographic is still nice and low.
I'll pass on job related advice from them, or the head of 3rd tier IT company, thanks very much.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I wonder how they would handle sending files? At least once a month I email my boss a file I might be working on. Maybe it's a PSD of a new flyer or an XLS with our customer info but i'll email it over and maybe he'll email it back with some changes. Works out quite well.
Then there's keeping logs of conversations for accountability. If I email the secretary to order something and it doesn't get ordered, I can just search my sent email for 'order' in the subject and find the email to show I sent it. It doesn't seem as easy to do that with a messaging client as you'd need to search chat logs which aren't as neatly formated.
I understand why IM / Skype are preferred, and I do the same with my coworkers, but not every communication needs to be real-time. When email and IM are both available, email becomes a "when you have a moment" queue, while IM is "Right Fucking Now (tm)". If someone sends me an email, I'll quickly scan it, maybe flag it on a to-do list, and deal with it when I'm idle or bored.
My expected response times:
Email: 24hrs
IM: 10 mins
Phone: immediate (duh)
The best way to get me to yell at someone, is to mis-prioritize something. Email me a work order, then call 5 minutes later asking why it hasn't been done: yelling. Call me to post an event on the site that's 3 months away, which details you have yet to finalize: yelling. Text me from McBurgerWay to ask if I want anything: yelling.
All three channels have their pros and cons, and should be used appropriately. To completely shun one or two of them, to me at least, seems incredibly foolish and even ignorant.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
and i work for atos... we've been focusing on using office communicator more often - this reduces the cost of conference calls, and allows for realtime chat - love the integration with outlook too - knowing if someone is currently available, if they're about to go into a meeting etc. i do however value email and its "audit trail" but i suppose theres enough paperwork outside of this, and technically, big decisions shouldn't only have an email backing it up?
The nice thing about email is I can ignore it until I have time to deal with it, instead of constantly being interrupted by inane questions.
The other nice thing about email is there is a trail of the conversation I can use to say "No, you said this" and forward them a copy when they change their mind about something and claim I "misunderstood" them, which has saved my butt more than once on bad specs.
It's also pretty much impossible to get everyone online with a chat-type system at the same time, but easy to CC everyone concerned.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
For his part Breton hasn't sent a work email in three years. 'If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word.'
I have always wondered why more companies don't use Slashdot own software.
Most email that appears to be useless appears so because it is difficult to follow complex issues in a non threaded medium.
Once a discussion becomes threaded it is much simpler to get clarification to the right question at the right moment (and you don't get tons of email with replies that you don't really need to read).
Another means is to have an internal news website, where important announcements are posted and a short reminder or summary about the days topics are sent, instead of sending one message per announcement.
As for people using email as their main tool for monitoring systems, they have my full and undivided contempt.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This is so sad. It's a symptom of a much greater problem: We are reaping the latest crop that was sown by modern education. The little Johnys and Janes are barely literate. Composing even the simplest prose (to answer an email or any other written communication) just takes too long for the average person entering the workforce today.
You might be right about this. My daughter got a temp job as an admin assistant while she studies. They asked applicants to respond to a fictitious email, then write a reply to a letter using MS word. Evidently that brought the number of applicants going into an actual interview down from twenty to three...
'If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message
That great if you don't have any other work to do! Email is much less distracting, so doesn't interupt work flow, and can be processed in a batch at convenient times during the day. Phone calls and IM, require an immeiate shift of focus. If my input is really needed for something /now/ then fine, call me. If not, I'd rather you'd not assume that want to be disturbed.
The converse is also true though... if you need my attention urgently and immediately, email is not the best approach as I will make no guarantees to when it will be dealt with. Please don't send an email if you are going to get upset when I haven't responded within any given timespan. You'll probably get confirmation, by email, when I've dealt with it but you'll have to wait until I've finished these annoying phone calls on otherwise non-time-sensitive topics!
If e-mail is irrelevant why is the number sent going up?
Not that "about" is a relevant source but it is the first I found:
http://email.about.com/od/emailtrivia/f/emails_per_day.htm
There were 50 billion more e-mails in 2010 than 2009. Sure most of them were for enlarging body parts... but still- it is not a dead medium.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
...that it is a record of responsibilities and commitments; especially in a corporate environment.
An example is a company I used to be involved with was purchased by "very large corporation." The people in this "very large corporation" had a MUCH different work ethic than the people in our Company. They ducked responsibility like it was a fresh dose of bubonic plague. They weaseled, they professed ignorance, they tried the 'plausible deniability' route, they tried everything. Once they realized that I kept every interoffice e-mail permanently and I wielded these as a weapon against their insipid mediocrity (a superlative they don't deserve) - two things happened. Our meetings became less about "what? I thought you were heading that up?" and more about "here's our current update..." The other thing that happened is that people tried to avoid responding to my e-mails that pinned them to accepting or rejecting their responsibilities, LOL.
Thank goodness I don't have to work there anymore.
Oh, and yes, it was a European Company that bought us.
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And yet some brilliant manager decided to hire them, instead of an unemployed 50 year old who could read and write.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I've seen exactly 1 spam message in my inbox in the last 8 months. I get around 250 spam each week, I just never see it. I've never gotten a false positive on my spam.
Spam filtering is easy if you are just willing to put some time into it.
I don't know if you're trolling, bad at reading, or exceptionally bad at interpreting what you're actually writing.
Nowhere did it say that the 90% that wasn't useful was spam.
Furthermore it did say that it was regarding internal e-mails, i.e. from one staff member to another, just as you wrote. If 90% of that were spam, you'd be right - but then the problem wouldn't be that they would be bad at filtering out spam, but the fact that on their internal network there's people and/or machines sending spam.
And if they do have a solution for that, given that it's an internal problem, I'm sure they'd love to sell it to themselves - there's bound to be some manner of tax loophole they can take advantage of there.
Now yes, they are probably just trying to deal with an organizational problem (people sending e-mails in the first place, probably to the wrong recipient(s), such as the dreaded e-mails to ALL employees regarding who took their precious iPhone charger that was on their desk) by trying to butcher it altogether... but that's a different discussion entirely.
I have heard of temp agencies where I'm from doing exactly this. Particularly the ones that deal with law offices, doctors offices or high-end manufacturing. And you're right -- it definitely weeds down the applicants.
Another company I used to work for would require you give them an email address so HR could send them an email and ask some questions that required longer answers to see how articulate they would be. Seemed to work well for their needs.
"I love lamp."
It's the next big communication medium. Everything on one page. So easy to use.
Deleted
Maybe you need to put less words in your emails...
No sig today...
"You and Thierry have something in common: you're both obviously top posters."
Fixed that.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
So, he's opted to remove the ability for employees to have a time delay for communication. I don't know about anyone else, but if my life is full of IMs, phone calls, and drive-by conversations and I can't get a blinking thing done. If it's not urgent, send an email ...and most issues at my workplace really do fall into the "not urgent" category. It would be utterly inefficient to interrupt my workflow every 15 minutes for an instant conversation.
Email also has the benefit of making the writer organize his/her ideas better. Plus, commitments are in writing. It's less likely for an email to be misinterpreted, but conversations can always be remembered in "creative" ways. The only people I've ever met who refused to do email were people who didn't want to be pinned down.....wanted to leave their options open, usually to stick other people with the work to do and/or the blame for a mistake.
staff spend between 5-20 hours handling emails every week.
Man, so how many hours will they spend if they are on Facebook and Twitter trying to accomplish the same thing?
only 10 per cent of the 200 electronic messages his employees receive per day on average turn out to be useful,
10 per cent is an awesomely high signal to noise ratio in Facebook and Twitter.
"Emails cannot replace the spoken word.'" Sure nice comment for the CEO to make when he has people doing his actual emails/letters for him. However, in a real company, where real accountability with projects, employees and customers is required, the spoken word is nothing but that, spoken. When I ask a project manager why a customer compained about something not being done, and he clearly demonstrates it to me in an email, then I won't have to "take the spoken word" for it will I?
I guess maybe I'm old now? But I love the asymmetric nature of the communication, sometime I don't want to talk to you RIGHT NOW but I do need to start or get back to a conversation about something. I also love the ability to store and catalog email threads its useful sometime months later to go back and say on June 12th you me and Bob all agreed to create this page with these features, and here is you saying you liked the idea.
The last company I worked for took it one step further. They just stopped communicating. I told the boss I was impressed they actually told me I was laid off.
It depends on what kind of job you have. If your primary duty is dealing with people, real-time contact makes sense. If you are a developer, an engineer, an architect, or anyone else whose job requires concentration, real-time interruptions are a work-killer. Of course, the PHBs of the world generally do not understand this.
Personally, I have 2-3 work-related phone calls per month. Everything else goes by email or a non-interactive web-service.
That said, there is indeed far too much internal email. If someone really cares about the minutes of some departmental meeting, put them on an Intranet site - don't bombard every single employee with a copy. The same for the latest opinion piece of the CEO, the latest changes to company health insurance, etc. - have a central site for company news, which people can look at (or not) if and when they want to.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
You upload the file to your issue-tracking forum under the issue related to the file you're working on. File a topic/thread/bug/whatever for the new flyer and post your PSDs to that. And the forum logs your related conversations.
IT department is all about kickbacks from software and hardware vendors. Certainly Skype, MSN, ICQ, etc. light but encrypted chat messages are much better for it.
Rather than abolishing email altogether I think they should adopt a "stop sending useless crap" policy. If only 10% of 200 emails/day is considered useful, then why is it being sent to them them?
Filter out the crap and email will be more streamlined.
You know talking over Skype isn't going to be much more productive than the time it takes to read emails. You'll have your own set of extra challenges such as note taking, idle chitchat, longer conversations, and what have you. Certainly Skype and IM's have a place. It's good for getting a quick answer or conversation that needs immediate attention. Otherwise email seems far more useful.
One of the requirements (rightly or wrongly) of using non MS products, is that you also have to know how to babysit people who are. e.g.
Save As...
File Type: Mcrosoft Word 97/2000/XP (.doc)
Invaders must die
The problem is the culture. The fact that there is a poor signal to noise ratio in employee communications is unlikely to be remedied by simply swapping medium... The garbage will just come through the new channel. The situation will only improve if people begin thinking about what is necessary to communicate, rather than spamming every thought that comes into their mind.
Of course, banning *all* forms of electronic, textual communication might help this... but it doesn't seem (from the summary at least) that this is what's being suggested.
It has been found out that employees are spending 5-20 hours handling IM and twitter, now that emails are banned.
If they would only stop screwing around and make the company gobs of money without taking up any time!
I like the legend of Napoleon's mail. Story has it that he never opened anything mailed to him until it was at least one month old, and by that time, most issues had resolved themselves.
and how many lost because they had been using AbiWord, LibreOffice Writer, or some other non-Microsoft word processing application?
That makes no sense. If you are familiar with those alternative word processors, you should also be familiar with the 'export as MS-select year-.doc' option.
If corporations would send out their internal memos only twice a day, say, 7:00am and 12:-00pm, that wouldn't necessarily reduce the quantity of emails but would greatly reduce the interruptions. And, only use the "high importance" flag when absolutely necessary. And if people would quit hitting "reply all" unless it is necessary. I would also like to see many of the repetitious "status" emails coalesced onto a webpage. Most I don't need unless I happen to be working on a particular event, software, or machine, and then an audit trail of entries would be useful.
but the fact that on their internal network there's people and/or machines sending spam.
Spam = unsolicited bulk commercial email. Yeah we've got some heavy spam senders here.
Hmm, boss thinks I'm slacking, I'll show him, plus I hate that guy in engineering... I know I'll send automatic hourly ticket status updates to the entire engineering distribution list, and when their manager complains, I'll do some superiority games to prove how important and hard working I am. Who cares if the entire department sets up email rules to autodelete the incoming spam, I've WON!
Now repeat that about 50 times over (no kidding) and you'll see why my trash folder is full.
Aside from internal warfare, it also shows up in the electronic equivalent of "hoarding". You know the guy who still has every grocery store bag he has ever received, just in case he might need one some day, in a closet packed so tight the mice can't even get in? He's got a brother who thinks it best that the entire company get UPS status notifications, on the off chance that a secretary in an offshore office might need to know the incoming line frequency is 0.0001 Hz lower today than yesterday... Sure its probably useless, but WHAT IF, and who will be brave enough to take the fall for not sending it to everyone and making everyone responsible (aka, no one responsible) for knowing the charging current today for battery cell #3 ?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
A long time ago I worked with a Boss who would say just about anything to keep his superiors happy and got extremely angry if we raised concerns about the project with him via email.
I think the idea of not sending emails works at certain levels of a business but at the worker ant level it can realistically be the only way to protect yourself from the corporate psychopath or from just simply being burnt by an idiot work colleague, or worse, a sneaky client just trying to get work for free.
Calls, texts and (good Lord!) having someone walk up and talk to you are all examples of interruptions. The beauty of email is that you don't have to deal with it until you're ready to deal with it. Other communication methods have their place, but eliminating email altogether is a step backwards.
Proverbs 21:19
>>arguing that only 10 per cent of the 200 electronic messages his employees receive per day on average turn out to be useful, and that staff spend between 5-20 hours handling emails every week. 'The email is no longer the appropriate (communication) tool,' says Breton.
How is replacing email with anything else will decrease time dealing with non-important info? They spend just as much, or more dealing with information coming from other channels then. Non-relevant emails will just turn into non-relevant phonecalls and messages. If we are talking about IMs, then overhead and the need for real-time communication is a certain recipe for mistakes, miscommunications and whatnot.
Doing business over SMS Are you kidding me?
>>'If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word.'
Now that's a very efficient way to do business. Would they like every client to call them or come down to the office personally to get the information? Now that's a very efficient way to filter out any client, that has anything to do with their time other then waiting in line of those, who don't.
Now replacing email as a mean for communication _inside_ the organization — that might make sense. If they replace internal mailing lists with XMPP and bulleting board/collaborative software like Wave (nothing to laugh about, it's gone open source and "largest EU company" can afford further development, should they see the need for it). That will be more of a e-mail 2.0 with ability to send both well though-out messages and initiate chats should the need for a quick interaction arise.
- Peter
-- That grumpy BSD guy - http://bsdly.blogspot.com/
Agreed, I work with a LOT of modern students from ages 17 to 75. Most of them, the younger ones, HATE writing and reading anything. Mainly because it takes them soooo long to do it and requires so much effort. I love writing my college papers because I have read hundreds of books and therefore know how to write and further enjoy it. It is nothing for me to write a report running on for seven pages that is concise and well formed with unique content, for the average student that is like asking for a couple of their finger nails and they subsequently quote dump, plagiarize and "bullshit" their way through it. Drum roll......they still get good grades for the junk they hand in, so they think they are doing a good job. If they later attend a good university they wonder why their English professor keeps handing their papers back to them with "rewrite" at the top. At lesser universities they continue along the lines of the community college and high-schools to keep collecting tuition, simple as that.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
But is not a good replacement for e-mail entirely.
The goal of a chat program or social message board is to communicate in a quick, instant and off-and-on manner. To get a message across or make a quick inquiry about a subject, and get a quick response.
While it's more than possible to punch through full tutorials and make backups of chat conversations, it's certainly cumbersome compared to the relatively longer shelf life and easy retrieval format of e-mails.
Eliminating the internal e-mail system entirely just seems brash.
That's the sound of a meteor from the asteroid belt having been pulled into earth's orbit by space aliens responding to our 1960s Star Trek TV (original series) transmissions, plummeting through the atmosphere and flying just over top of your head.
Or, did you miss it?
Deleted
r u serious?
wat a da
lol
Anything is possible given time and money.
So, I've gone to great lengths to craft mail filters to sort my incoming deluge of company email. I know the offenders who send me volumes of useless junk. I've got filters for all of the distribution mail that comes out of every level of the company. I know that once caught by the filters and diverted to one of many folders, I can spend little to no time actually reading the contents of the folder because there's little to nothing that's actually useful in those emails so going through the list once a day (or less) is a short task. The few internal emails that end up actually landing in my inbox tend to be useful and contain information that I actually need to process. But since there are so few of them I can devote time to processing them.
This is a great system. I end up getting very few interruptions during my day. I can concentrate on my work and get into the zone while I'm digging through my software and I can get something done.
But this guy wants to take away email and replace it with instant messaging and other intrusive communications services that demand my attention whenever some boffin decides to tell the world that he's updated some tool that I never use? Great. Now I have to deal with that crap that I've carefully figured out how to ignore. Instead of having a system that lets me address communication when I have time to do so, I have to now use a system that interrupts me whenever anything is being sent to me, whether the message is important or not. Instead of being able to focus on getting work done, I have to deal with a constant stream of interruptions. Good luck trying to focus on anything when your messenger is constantly pecking at you for attention on an irregular basis.
I suppose it's possible to configure messengers to filter and limit interruptions. But then if you filter the incoming messages so you can go back and read them when you have the time, you may as well just use email since that's better at that style of communication.
The switch to alternate forms of communication doesn't solve the underlying problem that far too many people spam out far too much useless information. My solution to the information overload problem in email is to first get rid of distribution lists and limit the number of recipients for a single email to a very small number. Say 20 people or less. If you need to send information to more people than that, come up with an internal web site where you can post distribution information that people can go read when they feel like reading it. Despite assertions to the contrary, there is almost no need to spam large groups with distribution email.
If you do that, you'll find that information overload will be significantly reduced overnight. Those organizational announcements and IT bulletins that nobody reads won't be filling up everyone's inboxes. The release announcements from the tools group that no one really cares about won't clutter up your inbox. The self important idiot who wants to tell the world about his 3rd quarter financials won't be able to bother people who don't care. The idiot who feels the need to post that he published something on the website won't be able to bother you. End distribution lists and you kill a large contributor to information overload.
Text messaging might be a great way to flirt, but my boss sent me a network down emergency via text messaging, and it didn't get addressed for 3 days. Seriously, people need to use the proper medium for the message. A network down emergency is worthy of a phone call. Bulky info or info that needs to be saved should be sent via email. Teenagers use text messaging because they aren't communicating anything of substance to each other.
Yes, 90% of my stuff is irrelevant. I can tell from the subject line most of the time. I generally ignore it and it doesn't take time out of my day to deal with it. I leave it on the server and in the off chance I was wrong, a phone call or chat has me with a place to delve into the history. Bonus: I can read the most recent update and largely ignore the leadup.
The issues around chat style interfaces:
-BCC is sometimes critical. e.g. you have to get something to your boss for reference but do not want them pulled into some silly discussion
-Asynchronous communication amongst a bunch of people. If a guy in China wants to have a discussion with people in europe and the US, chat works poorly
-It's harder to ignore the 'meat' of messages that aren't pertinent to you.
No matter what, people *will* subject you to irrelevant communication. You have to pick the medium that lets you manage that most efficiently.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
But how many of those seventeen lost because they don't know how to reply to e-mail
half
and how many lost because they had been using AbiWord, LibreOffice Writer, or some other non-Microsoft word processing application?
none, none, facebook = half
I pay all of my bills electronically, and receive all communication from my home services (electricity, Comcast, mortgage, banking, etc.) via email. When I receive things in the regular mail I pretty much just scan through it and throw it all away.
In my work, nearly all communication is via email, both internal and with clients. Whoever says that "no one uses email anymore" lives in some kind of bubble.
Email is a replacement for snail mail, and it serves a universal purpose that has existed since the dawn of the written word: the ability to send someone a message. That simple use case is not going away. And not everyone belongs to Facebook. I don't, and will never, because I don't trust them. Google+, yes, I have an account, but not everyone does. Email is universal in that you can reach anyone who has an email address.
It is obvious that writing and speaking are each appropriate in some situations and inappropriate in others. As an attorney, I deal with the written word at least as much as the spoken word. Email is obviously an excellent way to transmit written words. It is a terrible medium for having a conversation, and everyone should realize that. For two-way information exchange involving small bits of information, voice is obviously best. For one-way information transmission or large blocks of information, text is obviously best. If I need to have a conversation in which I am asking more than two questions, I will use the phone. If I want to tell somebody some information, or request some information, I will use email. This is never more clear than when you are on the phone with someone for 5 minutes transcribing a list which could be transmitted in 5 seconds via email. If I want to send a contract to Mr. Breton for review, what am I supposed to do? Skype him and narrate the whole thing while he writes it out on a legal pad? Send him a snail-mail envelope?
The example of employees asking for an email summarizing the content of meetings implies, to me, that the meetings were unnecessary (at least for some of the attendees) and could have been handled better by simply sending an email to convey information. The article is also somewhat confusing in what it's claiming about email in the workplace: on the one hand, it's saying that there is so much email that nobody can keep up with it, and on the other, it's saying that email is being abandoned. If it is being naturally abandoned, then there is no reason to forcefully ban it. If there is too much junk going around, then you need to organize your company. If there's simply too much information for your employees to process, then you need more employees. Maybe Mr. Breton was saying something reasonable, but it wasn't transcribed very well in the article.
Because of its wide adoption and simple nature, email is still the best way to send a large or medium amount of text to someone.
So the corporation in TFA is adopting a no email policy in favor of tweets and the like. Doing this because of documented "lost" time spent on email.
Sounds like a trade-off between between the documented time lost to managing emails and the impossible to measure productivity lost to the "But you said... No I did not..." arguments. Note that wrt those arguments, the hit to productivity is not just in the arguing, but also the losses incurred in correcting the mistakes.
I know I have been a pain in the butt to some managers when I have told them on the phone "hey, send me an email so I know exactly what you want done." Usually I did that not because I thought they were corrupt or were wanting to hang me out to twist in the wind, but because they were too lazy to think things through unless they were forced to by the archival nature of email.
Will
My work uses email for everything, I work on the Health industry and I communicate with several people in different countries and time zones, doing it by phone or chat will be almost impossible.
If I check at work at 7:00AM I usually start reading emails from people that are in Europe and Asia, it will be almost impossible to get in touch with me in the middle of the morning for them unless is an emergency, the beauty of email is that the moment you sit and try to write your thoughts you start to realize whats important and what is just anxiety, I have even noticed that people tend to write in simple words their most extreme problems that helps them and me to actually see what I need to do to be able to comply with their request.
I specially see this in Latino countries (I am Mexican) when phone calls tend to drag a lot on unnecessary chit-chat that only takes time and wont contribute anything to the discussion (endless weather, economic, nonsense chat).
Of course one thing that helps me is to either give an instant answer to their problem or just to shoot a quick reply that you saw their request and that you will fix it ASAP.
Also email helps you to see a history of the conversations without the blah added to them.
My personal email is a different beast, I usually receive the chain mail email, spam and other stuff but I don't need to respond immediately if something is discussed that actually needs my attention (get together, dinner parties etc) the moment you treat work email as work and not as a social gathering you will see that is a really nice work tool.
Everything that transacts (email, POTS/VOIP, twit/text ...) between people, using a PKI/personal certificate and bio-login, on any network can be proof of participation and responsibility. The network owner would be responsible (potential failure point) for assuring PKI/personal certificate and bio-login forensics for legal purposes.
Voice files with meta-tags are highly compressible. Voice to text transcriptions are possible. Voice recognition would mitigate video (not eliminate) forensics requirements. ...
At sixty, I would be very happy to reduce keyboard-time, and increase voice+face time with some modern information technology.
Let's hurry it alone. How do we solve the intransigence in the workplace/government to define policy, regulations, laws ... to protect personal privacy, accept that technology changes, and TODAY information rules everything in all societies/cultures [So, make it more human natural!].
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
The issue is that they did not know how to properly setup a letter in the word processing application (Be in MS Word / LibreOffice / whatever).
If you don't know how to either:
A) Use a letter template from the base application install
B) Create your own letter properly with Address / Name / etc
C) Use Google to look up how to do this for the question
You should most definitely be removed from the stack.
with only 11 per cent of 11 to 19 year-olds using it.
What an odd metric. Why would an information technology company base anything off of what the general populace of 11 to 19 year olds does? Have they suddenly become a lightning rod to what's hip in information technology? Why would what is or isn't trendy ever enter a conversation about how a company should internally communicate? I wonder what percentage of 11 to 19 year olds end up working in IT as ... idk... say... postmasters.
The Admin and the Engineer
From the summary, the problem is that most of the emails the employees get aren't useful and it takes too long for the employee to go through them. So, how does receiving all of those emails via facebook or twitter cut down on the time involved to determine what is useful or not. The summary states the employees are getting, on average, 200 emails a day. 200 FB posts seems even less efficient.
Besides, do you really want to discuss marketing strategies or contract negotiations on FB?
Email is still far better than anything else in a number of situations:
We have customers who ask us to be available on IM. We refuse. I find IM far more disruptive than email. If a customer really needs real-time interaction, he/she can phone us. The fact that the customer pays a nominal amount in long-distance charges helps discourage frivolous requests.
We are reaping the latest crop that was sown by modern education.
To be fair, I'm not sure how effectively any educational system could cope with the level of distraction that kids face these days. The development of basic skills - reading, writing, math - requires significant time in practice and drills, and at any given time they have access to gadgets that are much more compelling time sinks.
Phone or chat don't conveniently provide you with a permanent record of what someone actually said.
Chat logs usually exist, but a chat session is not usually in as concise and readable form as an email. I'm not prepared to waste time hand-editing chat logs and making some sort of archive system so I can keep only the pertinent info.
Furthermore chats are harder to collaborate as people have to be available at the time.
There is no analog for CC with chat. Even with a multiple-person chat session, there is no mechanism to share info with people who can't attend right now.
At least at my workplace, most emails are valid and usually short so already mostly contain just the pertinent info, and most email clients already have a system of classification/archive folders.
At work we have both pidgin and email. To be honest, pidgin is hardly used.
Same thing.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Or you use a file delivery server, which your company owns and controls (i know this sounds like an advert, but i had to build something like this recently)...
You upload a file to it, it gets encrypted and stored there and you need a unique code and password to access it...
You can also email a file to it, the attached file is automatically imported into the system...
You might pre-agree the password, or send it out of band, or not bother at all if the file isnt private...
You send the URL to the recipient, he visits it, enters the password and the file is downloaded in his browser over HTTPS...
The server logs that the user retrieved the file, and can optionally alert you via email that its been downloaded...
Files which remain unretrieved for a user-specified period of time expire and get deleted from the server, you can also be notified of this happening...
You can specify how many times a file can be downloaded, after that it gets securely erased from the server.
There is also a two server mode, for people on slow connections... You have a server on your lan (lets say you have slow upload, or a dsl line with very mismatched up/down speeds) and a faster server on the internet... You upload to the local server, and so long as you don't specify that the file is urgent it doesn't get forwarded on to the remote server until a predefined time (ie at night when noone is at work, or in the background at a very slow rate so as not to lag your line)...
I have such a system online, although i am still in the middle of developing it..
https://sdm.ev6.net/file.php
if you want me to put a test file on there, drop me a mail to sdm [at] ev6 [dot] net
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I guess that such state of the email can be attributed to the structure of that company (and all large organizations in general), not to the email itself.
In my opinion it is down to policies and tactics like CYI (Cover Your Ass), micromanagement, dictatorship, "I know it better than techies", ... and plain old bureaucracy to name a few. They lower the quality/usefulness of any communication medium.
If those are not addressed, nothing will be solved. And any new communication medium which will be chosen to replace email will be killed in short future too.
Maybe we can also look at "paperless office" to learn the same. :)
hany
and how many lost because they had been using AbiWord, LibreOffice Writer, or some other non-Microsoft word processing application?
That makes no sense. If you are familiar with those alternative word processors, you should also be familiar with the 'export as MS-select year-.doc' option.
She actually had to write the letter on their computer using MSWord. However I think it was so straightforward that knowledge of the word-processor was pretty much irrelevant, it was not a long structured document. My daughter is most familiar with LibreOffice but used an older version of MSWord when she was at school, but had no problem writing a simple response in a later version of Word.
Ugh. I went through that exact same transition. It got to the point that I started Cc'ing my boss (by his request) on every single email I sent to coworkers so that he always knew which ones were ignoring my questions. After several attempts, he'd call their bosses and stuff would magically start happening.
It didn't make our department popular with the entrenched employees, but it got stuff done and senior management loved the results.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Basically I prefer email over talking directly to people. As a previous poster wrote, it allows you to organize your thoughts or think something through before telling it to somebody else. This way email communication is of higher quality and more productive.
But the phone is much better suited when dealing with more trivial tasks. In my work we depend on a lot of external suppliers and you'll never get anywhere with them if you communicate via email (long delays between reponses). Somebody wrote that an advantage of email is that you can answer at your convenience. Sure that's nice if you are on the right side, but if you are the manager of a large factory and a crucial machine breaks down, you call the manufacturer so that he can fix that ASAP. With email it would take days before the factory can produce again
My advice is to use email in high level design/development/research discussions, non-trivial troubleshooting and document exchange (bills, quotes etc.) and the phone for everything else. Forget icq/facebook, it combines the disadvantage of the phone (no organization of thoughts, chit chat) with the disadvantage of the email (no one is forced to answer you immediately).
He's a CEO. He deals with what he wants, when he wants - and believe me, in a European firm this is backed up by a legion of drones (secretarys, CSMs, etc) who actually DO ALL THE WORK, so that he can 'browse' his way through the "important decisions" he has to make.
In short, a CEO does perform a critically important role in a company. It has very little similarity with the actual 'work' performed by the bulk of the people at that firm.
Email's value is in allowing people to time-shift. I can triage my daily work as long as the bulk of it is on email, and know that there's always a papertrail.
I can't wait until Thierry needs a contract "immediately". If I were his secretary, I'd have someone fax it over onto one of those thermal-paper-roll fax machines.
-Styopa
Yep. They had appointed a transition manager to integrate our company with the division of the "very large corporation" that purchased us, and after a while I simply BCC'd him on everything I had to re-iterate, such as "Heinrich" - (hint) - ", you *did* receive the two previous e-mails asking you for confirmation of your action items from two weeks ago, yes/no?"
I really don't miss those meetings about having meetings... :)
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Very paternalistic and ignoring the fact that people are all different in how they approach their jobs.
Of course the lower level workers will ignore any such edicts due to their own French individualness.
The problem isn't email, it's the throng of coworkers who think that email is a deliverable. A zero tolerance ban on email comes from someone wearing his ass for a hat. It will lead to reduced productivity. On the other hand there are a lot of people out there abusing email. At my previous company we had to upgrade a Lotus Notes email server because it was overloaded. Then we discovered that a lot of users had their client set to check email once every minute. Throttle the client so it cannot check for new email more than once an hour. Cap the number someone can send each day.
It is nothing for me to write a report running on for seven pages that is concise and well formed with unique content, for the average student that is like asking for a couple of their finger nails and they subsequently quote dump, plagiarize and "bullshit" their way through it.
I had a history professor that wanted a run-on fact dump for an essay. I was nearly failing his class until I understood that. Teachers' requirements (and by extension, how they teach writing) aren't necessarily consistent.
It's how the tool is used.
Check your premises.
Less than 10% of the things I hear people say have any significance.
We should ban speech too.
Afterall; anything that's not 100% good, is bad.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Europe's largest IT company. And I've never even heard of them.
Imagine how much different the media world would have reacted if it read "HP or Apple" was going to cease using email?
Not trying to knock Europe. I was rather surprised when I re-read this post and it said Europe's largest IT company.
Seriously, there has to be a bigger European IT company out there, one that most people know of. I can't imagine Europe's largest is a company that has little name recognition?
Who is really Europe's largest IT company?
but how many business related e-mails have been sent by his secretary/admin assistant. Also CEOs, in general, usually don't broadcast a lot of e-mails (if they do then something is wrong). Usually your frontline, leads and managers are the ones utilizing e-mail the most. I foresee a lot of 'miscommunications" in Bretons company's near future.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
make sure to include computer and mobile computer because those require two different pattens.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Why would I care what his opinion is regarding the usefulness (or lack thereof) of email? He's not doing any actual work in the sense that most of us understand it, nor does he likely have any idea regarding how "normal" people actually interact and get things done.
#DeleteChrome
"Let's wait for his tweet to see if he restored that backup!" Some companies have already deployed their own internal IM solution, however, less than 1% uses it. They also deployed a social platform. It's like a ghost town. I remember an investment bank banning all twitter activity from their employees. E-mail has been there since the beginning of the Internet and we use it everyday. I just look at my inbox, and 90% of the messages are relevant to my work. Maybe that IT company is doing it wrong. =)
I use e-mail a lot, but I also have a hard time keeping track of it. Group discussions over e-mail can be a mess.
For internal communication, most companies fail to use an issue tracker (to keep track of internal task dispatching between teams and announcements). I find that for small-medium sized companies, tools such as Redmine are a great way to reduce the quantity of e-mail. (and yes, even in non-development shops)
It's also nice to have a person create a weekly/monthly digest so that no one misses anything important -- but only one e-mail per week, and only with links to what is in the tracker.
Anyway, I'm sure there are tons of books/articles already on the topic, but I was surprised not to see much talk about issue trackers in this thread.
I would assume none, because if you know how to use just about any WYSIWYG document editor, you can certainly use the base functionality of any other WYSIWYG document editor, ESPECIALLY if the one you normally use is not MSWord.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
"From now on, all employees must replace email with posts to a slashdot forum. Warning: never mod your boss's posts down!"
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
This is preaching at the Open choir here. It's a group of people who won't accept that there's no real functional difference in word processors, spread sheets, etc. I use OpenOffice, MS and Lotus. Not a lot of difference (barring GUI).
"Mainly because it takes them soooo long to do it and requires so much effort."
No, it's mainly because it makes them look illiterate and they *know* it makes them look illiterate. The kids aren't stupid, they're undereducated and embarrassed.
Easy. Disallow those distractions in school and enforce learning of the basics. IOW, revamp the school systems and return to basics.
I have no kids of my own, but I have nephews. The oldest is in college at a good quality state university. I had a conversation with him not terribly long ago and it went something like this:
Me: I saw you wrote "prolly" on Facebook. You do know that that is not a real word, right?
Him: What do you mean?
Me: "Prolly" is text message speak. The real word is "probably".
Him: (look of puzzlement and confusion)
Me: I'm not joking. You've never heard of "probably"?
Him: I've only seen "prolly".
When you graduate from an American high school and you are a reasonably intelligent person (he's got a B average at college) and you think "prolly" is a real word and you don't know what "probably" is, the educational system may just be broke beyond fixing.
No one wants to use email anymore.
Of course not; they want to twitter or IM or ICQ or ...
But if you think about it, this is just the standard marketer's trick of taking an old product, giving it a new name, and pushing it as a "New! Improved! "product. People fall for it, and want the latest hot stuff, even when it's just a rebranding of a previous fad.
It makes sense to distinguish textual communication (email, "messaging", etc.) from vocal communication (phone, skype, SIP, etc.), but the entries in either class are only trivially different. They're cases of different names having different images due to marketing and fads.
Of course, it did make sense to replace a lot of the old email systems with the radically simplified versions such as ICQ and twitter. But this is really just resurrecting the very earliest versions of email from the 1970s. Back then, bandwidth was very limited, and you had a strong motive to minimize the text's size. Now that we have faster comm systems, "email" in many forms has accumulated a lot of cruft. Some of the GUIs are intimidating, and their users often don't really understand how they work. You can see this from all the "Oop! I didn't mean to Reply All" messages. Replacing these email packages with something that's stripped down to the basics is a real boon to many users (including the us geeks ;-).
But pretending that people are abandoning email is just silly, when the list of replacements includes things that differ only in name from the original email packages.
And Thierry Breton's comment "If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word" is especially silly. He allows text messaging, making it clear that he doesn't understand what messaging is and how little it differs from email. He's telling the world that he has fallen for the marketers' hype, hook line and sinker. Someone should tell him that the only significant difference between "messaging" and "email" is the spelling of their names (and the amount of cruft in the email package that your employer foists on you ;-).
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
You juice need to inner face sky to drag on naturally speaking or some other text two speach program. Then you can half a wreck gourd of everything they say.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
no one ever used e-mail to replace the spoken word. especially in business. we use e-mail to replace the mailed word -- that's why it's e-mail, not e-spoken.
you can't send a document via text message, or twitter. and you can't send a confidential document via facebook or skype.
and, in business, records matter. the fantastic part about e-mail is that both sides get a record of instructions. the whole: yes-i-did-tell-you, no-you-didn't-tell-me is easily resolved. e-mail is easily a basic crm.
if you were using e-mail for anything else, you were always mis-using it.
If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word.'"
I don't want to be the one to break it to him that texts are not 'spoken words'.
Also, if he is OK with a text, why is he so against email? Email is an excellent way to transmit a lot of technical information. I hate when I have to call someone and speak a long model/serial number, or some random error message. An email makes sure there is no misunderstanding these types of things. It is also a much better way to keep records of what you need to do and what you have done. You can send to several people quite easily, and phone calls can waste a lot of time with the 'phone tag' that frequently occurs.
What I do hate is the group email that you get stuck on, and everybody keeps hitting 'reply all', but I quickly figure out if I need this information or not, and start deleting them.
In France, Thierry Breton is renowned for using a magnificent idea as management: Total Operational Performance, or TOP.
This is Lean management applied to people.
The idea is very simple: we manage people as resources, and if they are unused, they are reallocated elsewhere, or simply discarded.
Result of this brilliant idea: around 15 suicides last year, and more than 60 suicides since he applied his idea.
TOP is so bad that it succeeded in instilling fear in all french companies, which don't want to listen about Lean !
Lean is very successful in automobile industries, too bad for Peugeot and Renault.
Now, he's trying to apply it in Atos:
http://www.rue89.com/2011/05/24/apres-france-telecom-thierry-breton-passe-atos-a-lessoreuse-204971
(in french)
and a lot of people of Atos are very afraid.
Replacing emails by Facebook ? Another brilliant idea !
It's obvious that they will save a lot of time.
And directly speaking with people is so much more productive.
...staff spend between 5-20 hours handling emails every week.
Wow, whatever moron is spending nearly half their work week 'handling emails' needs to go to a basic email course on how to apply rules and sort emails.
"Europe's Largest IT Company tries to get some decent PR after all the recent bad publicity"
Email is the most broken, least secure communication system out there. It's also the slowest and the most filtered (primarily due to the lack of security, as there's no other way to deal with spam effectively). I only use it when I have to.
When I worked at a managed IT company in California, I found that the biggest recurring problem clients had was email. Much blame can be counted to either problems inherent in the system since the 70s or solutions to said problems.
I long since stopped using it for real communication. If I need to talk to someone, I drop a dime. I can't guarantee it got there, and I just don't frequently get anything important enough to justify digging through all the garbage. If I need to send them a file, I send it direct rather than hoping it gets through various filters, limits, and other problems with sending files via email. For anything else, instant messenger does the job infinitely better than email.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Obviously you don't work in a position that requires any form of real concentration. I find the phone is my constant enemy, I just get focused on a tricky design and then the thought process gets derailed by what is often an irrelevant phone call.
IIRC there was some research that such calls can disrupt someone's work for 10-15 minutes longer than how ever long the call lasts.
And where are the parents at?
damn i hate that! why the heck are you calling me?
Because calls tend to get better results most of the time. Email is fine for something that doesn't require an immediate response but sometimes you need someone's full and undivided attention regardless of whether they think it is a convenient time.
send me an email or IM! that is self documenting, and i can review it as often as i want to make sure i understood what you wrote
Or you could just call them back if there are missing details. Not everything needs to be documented in an email and you are perfectly writing down the details of the conversation. Furthermore, just because it is written in an email doesn't necessarily mean it is accurate or complete.
and can file it away in my TODO list so i don't forget..
You don't need an email from someone else to do that.
With a call as soon as you hang up i can't go back and replay it. If someone calls me and asks me to do something the first thing i always ask is for them to send me an email or IM with the request.
There is this nifty invention called taking notes. Perhaps you should try it some time. Frankly I find it rather irritating if I explain something to someone and then they ask me to explain it again. I hate calling on the phone so if I bother to do it I damn well expect you pay attention and take notes if you can't remember the salient details.
Also with phone they expect an immediate response, and so i have to interrupt what i am working on to respond to them.
Heaven forbid you respond to something at a time that isn't perfectly convenient for you. You seem to have a rather self centered idea of how the adult world works. Your personal convenience is not necessarily the most important important factor in the working world. Sometimes things need to be done at a time that is not ideal for your schedule. If you can't do it then, say so and deal with the consequences.
Maybe. There's some merit to the idea that any high school graduate, let alone one who was accepted to a college, should be aware of the correct form of "probably." But at the same time, this is exactly how language evolves, and losing words or creating new forms isn't really as terrible as some people would have us believe. We still manage to communicate without archaic terms such as "dost," "thou," "wherefore," "whosoever," etc., and the replacements for those words were slang and/or "improper" when they emerged as well, but are standard today. Fighting the evolution of language is as much of a wasted effort as fighting any other sort of sweeping change. The important thing is to be able to distinguish between people who are riding a wave of change, and those who are simply incompetent. If the only mistake in his communication was using "prolly," in lieu of "probably," then he prolly falls into the former category.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
So true.
Does it really serve to have no record of most discussions? If there's a place for formal, minuted, meetings, and a place for informal discussion off the record, surely that implies a continuum. Email serves a middle place in that continuum.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
we are forced, and push it on upper management, to keep everyone on the straight and narrow. Otherwise, backstabbers galore would have open season to blame anyone for almost anything.
Boss: What? I didn't tell you to buy new computers last week, oh yeah? well prove it or yer fired for unauthorized expenditure of funds.....
Lackey: Here's the email boss, now lets go talk to YOUR supervisor :P
Tweet, tweet, all id10t's out of the gene pool, open swim is over.
In a linguistic sense, "prolly" is a real word. It's a sequence of sounds, with a consistent spelling, that conveys a particular meaning. English is defined by usage, and so that means that new words are always used well before they're codified by Webster's or the OED. Not knowing what "probably" means is an issue, but the use of "prolly" isn't a problem in informal communication. If he's using it in his senior thesis, then there's a problem, but it's not that it's not a real word, it's that it's not a word that is consistent with the academic dialect of English. It's just like how we might so "fo' shizzle" or "y'all" in everyday speech or informal writing, and most everyone would know what we meant, but would never use it in a submission to an academic journal.
So you actually missed an opportunity to teach your nephew about how you have to speak and write differently in different contexts, and about how everything he says on Facebook will probably be seen by a potential employer.
I am officially gone from
I'd guess zero, but even if it were all 17, if the job requires the use of Microsoft Word, then the company is going to look to hire someone who knows how to use Microsoft Word.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
.. is to create a properly reference-able and searchable log of your communications. A "paper trail" so to speak. And having worked with Atos on several projects, I can see why scrapping email makes sense for them in this light.
Won't someone think of the children, and avoid using email that scares them? Old people we can throw away and use subtle age discrimination on, but those kids we absolutely must hire at any cost.
1. Talking to people face to face, to reach consensus, to learn things, to hear gossip, new ideas, anecdotes ...
2. A good and well-used wiki where anything official, semi-official or noteworthy can be found.
3. Forums, either as a News (NNTP) server or archived mailing lists. Not a sucky web forum isolated from everything else (like Slashdot) or email with reply-to-all chains. For discussions within a group or a project.
4. Email, mostly for one-to-one discussions which you may want to refer to later.
5. IM, for quick questions to (or hand-holding of) someone who isn't at his desk. Preferably using open standards so everyone can choose his IM client.
6. Sane version control of all documents, source code and other files produced.
You cannot remove any one of these without messing with the communication. At my current workplace we have 1, 2, 4 and 5. (3) is replaced by reply-to-all email which annoys people who aren't really interested, and never reach others because they weren't involved when the discussion started. (4) is replaced partly by mailing/IM:ing around copies of files, and partly by asking people rather than RTFM.
Leave me my off line communication!!!
The more on-line we get the crappier decision are taken. Just yesterday at a meeting some idiot thought it very cool to design a WSDL during a meeting. He was under the impression he did a fabulous job. After having pondered over the WSDL I will tomorrow slay it completely. I'm afraid the idiot will think himself to be slightly less cool afterwards.
We're not on sex and the city! We are busy writing rock solid software. Hate the friggin babblers!
Stuff needs time to mature in the brain. The more on-line we get the more chit chatting is done and the less structured thinking.
I'd volunteer to leave a company should I ever be denied email.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I don't know. My son's school handles it just fine. Of course, it has a 2:1 teacher to student ratio, and only one student enrolled.
More seriously, being able to pay attention is not a skill that is taught. As great as it is that we have public education, teaching children how to stay focused is just not something that can really be handled in a classroom with even a dozen kids. Being able to stay focused is a skill that really requires the parents to take part in. Unfortunately, most parents have now abdicated their role and given it to the state. Thus kids just are not taught to focus.
We have actually gone so far as to make "staying focused on a task" a school subject in our house because it really is that important of a skill. Since we home school, it is easy for us to just incorporate that into our son's curriculum, but there is no reason that the parents of public schooled kids can not do the same. Contrary to popular belief, just because one's children are in rolled in public schools, doesn't mean that the parents can't teach them anything.
I would say that the blame for his problem extends past the school system. How did he get to adulthood without either of his parents every using the word "probably"? How did he get to adulthood without his parents ever having heard him say "prolly"? Perhaps you should be look at hour sibling as much as the high school he attended. Don't dismiss the high school's responsibility, but they are not the only ones that carry the blame here.
'If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word.'"
I see... emails which can be of arbitrary length, have attachments, inline images, links etc. cannot replace the spoken word - but a severely restricted text message sent from a phone can?
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
So if all local businesses that pay more than minimum wage require familiarity with a particular expensive Microsoft product, then isn't Microsoft exercising undue market power over the labor market?
If you don't know how to either: [...] Use Google to look up how to do this for the question
This assumes that the screening was open-Internet. "Cannot look up www.google.com" followed by "Cannot look up www.bing.com" doesn't answer one's questions on how to use unfamiliar, expensive proprietary software.
So in another few years, prolly IS a real word.
I am sure you are aware that there are difference writing words in the US and in the real language English (Not my native one) and are you complaining about that as well?
At one point either one or the other was the original and making stoopid mistakes ticked off people just like yourself.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
He was prolly trollin you.
What I find interesting is how this is going to impact Compliance and Discovery type activities (things like PCI, SOX, etc etc). Theres lots of compliance type directives that basically say "communications inside and outside of your company must be kept for xxx days/years/months"... Alot of people read this as "we need to archive our email so if we get into a lawsuit we can cover our discovery requirements".
The best part of this is that people dont (yet) seem to realise that compliance and discovery don't specify email - they specify electronic communications. So if you dump email and move to something else and you have compliance requirements your going to have to comply with them no matter what your system of communication is!..
Keeping in mind of course that compliance and discovery type measures are defensive ones. The ability to prove/disprove something was done or said is simply a way of "covering your arse" in court and often where people read compliance to mean "i need to archive all communications" what it really means is "if i dont archive all communications, i cant prove joe from company X sent me an email telling me to do something".
Ultimately though, my point is that who ever wins the "internal social networking email replacement tool" war will also have a trail of developers behind them wanting to develop a set of archiving and compliance tools that go along with them... read that as $$$.
One of my younger cousins does this too. I don't think he's ever properly spelled a single word over three letters. Sometimes I wonder if he's entirely sober while typing.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Nor can the spoken word replace email. I need to concentrate on what I'm doing for several hours at a time or I will get NOTHING useful done at all. I do not ICQ, text chat or do voice calls if I can help it during the main part of my productive day.
Email allows you to quickly dispatch a useless communication. You think it's annoying tossing out 9 out of 10 emails? How will you feel when those same time wasters are chewing your ear off instead? Email forms a nice queue where you can check it when you're at a resting point. You can email others without worrying about interrupting them.
There are times when voice or text chat are the right answer. They do offer lower latency when you expect a lot of back and forth. It's also good for urgent matters (really urgent, not "can you Google this for me, I seem to have broken all but my phone dialing finger"!).
Managers hate email because they have to be precise about what they want and they cannot talk about their latest car or golf game in an email.
I have seen managers insisting on video conferences when a simple email would suffice. The video conferences usually last over two hours, and then one has to keep notes, which will be cleared up, emailed to all parties and signed off. The email could have saved all that.
Gmail and other good email clients are superb tools for dredging out old communications. Instant messengers suck at that, if only because the conversational format makes them much harder to read. How is ditching email an advantage?
If they cannot deal with me by email, I would look on this as evidence that they are not competent to supply an IT department. If they want my business, they need to catch up with the century. There are plenty others who do want my money...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Microsoft's job in this context is to sell as many copies of Office as it can. Every local business can look at MS Office and competing products and determine what the best choice for them is. If every company decided MS Office is the best choice, then I don't see how that has anything to do with Microsoft exercising undue market power. Microsoft isn't forcing anyone to use Office.
A smart employee would familiarize themselves with the commonly used tools in their area of expertise.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
Every local business can look at MS Office and competing products and determine what the best choice for them is.
Is it still "not forcing" when Microsoft makes its product the best choice primarily by failing at interoperability with other companies' products?