CEO of Europe's largest IT company plans to ban employees from using internal email

Breton’s plan is to have his employees off email in 18 months, and has statistics to back up his decision: a study deemed only 15 percent of internal emails at Atos “useful.”

That’s not a statistic. That’s an opinion.

Fixing an employment problem with tech is destined for success. Mark my words this will end well.

I’m curious about that facebook-style interface. Is that internally-developed, or a white-label of something like campfire? I’ve found myself using facebook groups and the like as replacement for email because of the threading and documents and photos. It actually works really well, if you’re willing to get passed the unprofessionalness of using facebook

Anyone know what mail app is in that screenshot?

I think it’s arrogant for IT workers or IT companies to (if they do) assume that the ‘lay’ majority, including company workers, will find other alternatives more useful or efficient.

Email is indispensable, and other technologies don’t come near for many users and use cases:

1) A local government Social care worker sends me a care assessment about someone I’m a carer for, to complete. We don’t have any other formal relationship. She simply has my contact details. I might be a rare PC user who goes to an internet cafe once a month, or on demand. She can phone to let me know it’s sent. I can reply, with comments, directly via email. Done. Alternatives? Waiting weeks for the post? Less secure, and I may even be overseas…

2) I send some photos, in my own time, to my grandmother overseas far away, in a low income country, she receives them, and sends me back a letter, in her own time. No need to have hi-tech technology, membership of any social networks.

3) I lose touch with a friend/acquaintance/relative – they always lose their mobile, their landline and address have changed, and they’re not on a social network. Email.

Almost everyone I know has an email address. Most non-IT people I know have only that, plus possibly Facebook and/or MMS (which probably won’t work if they are poor, have older handsets). Info sent via social networks probably gets lost if they don’t check much.

Further, like it or not, people, like me, use their email inboxes and accounts as a data store – one place they can back-up and search easily for anything – contacts, emails, chat history logs, pager messages, task lists, facebook messages, SMS messages synced from a phone, photos and links to photos, call log from a landline. It’s flexible. The email user can operate from a cybercafe, a smartphone, or a dial-up connection. The user can choose how to tag/filter their emails, and can include RSS feeds and social network feeds if they choose.

Rather than abandoning email, I and many other users, including workers, want any additional technologies in combination with email to make it more efficient (i.e. file storage, good searching and tagging), and more secure.

This CEO forgets that email also provides a chain of accountability. Also it provides a chain to identify where problems and arose. Email is very useful even if it isn’t ‘useful’ because it is useful.

In any event, other methods of communications are potentially more distracting. It’s a Channel of communications. The more you have the better the more ppl u have. The biggest problem in business internally is miscommunication and / or things unsaid… He said, she said. Email remedies that. Phone calls reinforce the solution. IM help. face to face helps.