Corporate mail is still the mainstream: leaders should lead change

While corporate social software and collaboration tools are emerging, corporate e-mail is still a big citeworld, according to the technology news website, a Rohn Miller of Ron Miller. This year, the number of corporate e-mails generated worldwide is up to 89 billion a day, up from 143.8 billion by 2016. Some insiders believe that the use of habits is difficult to change, unless the enterprise to change from top to bottom.

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The rise of corporate social software and easy-to-use online collaboration tools should have destroyed enterprise service mail. While we continue to hear stories about "email killers", emails are still prevalent, even in companies. With the increasing use of social and collaborative tools, why does e-mail still not fade?

Let's start by looking at some hard data. Corporate service messaging is growing rapidly, according to a report published by Radicati Group, an authoritative market research and advisory body. In fact, the report argues that 25% of the world's e-mail accounts are corporate mail accounts, with up to 89 billion corporate e-mails per day in 2012, which is expected to increase to 143.8 billion a day by 2016, at an average annual growth rate of 13%.

At the same time, the frequency of User Service messages will be reduced by 3% a year. The report said that the continued expansion of instant messaging and social networking would result in a reduction in User Service mail usage, and even so, there was no corresponding decline in corporate mail usage rates.

Box Enterprise General Manager Whitney Bock (Whitney Bouck) said that, in a way, this is just a habit, one after 25 or 30 years, it is difficult to break the habit. She blames these stand-alone applications for being able to use them across departments or across firewalls, or less easily than e-mail. But in the end, she thinks, if companies want to change, they go from top to bottom.

Bock explains, "when it comes to adopting new channels of communication, such as corporate social networking or collaborative tools, the ideal thing for a business is to have a champion, preferably at the management level, where the champion will be a torchbearer and make it clear to employees that they are using the new solution. This will encourage employees to try out new channels of communication. She adds that individual advocates and advanced users can also provide help to companies through training, which can greatly boost the pace of new communication channels in the enterprise.

At Microsoft's SharePoint Conference conference last week, it was easy to see a similar dependency on Microsoft's popular corporate service mail Outlook in Microsoft's ecosystem. On the one hand, Microsoft is aggressively promoting cloud technology, social networking and mobile services. Microsoft spent $1.2 billion in July this year to acquire Yammer, a cloud-based corporate social networking software maker, at the Yammer two co-founder David Sax (David Sacks) and Adam Pisony (Adam pisoni) Have made important speeches on the stage.

However, the current trend is shifting towards social development, and there is still much talk about how to continue working and living through outlook, and there are still a lot of business employees who depend on outlook for their working lives. In addition to trying to get people off the job paradigm, Microsoft is trying to integrate Outlook with the new version of SharePoint.

Jered Sch, senior executive at Microsoft's SharePoint Product Management department, Jared Spataro, said it was not a gamble. Although new communication methods are constantly superimposed on existing enterprise communication channels, they cannot eliminate the pattern traces before. "Instead of using the previous generations of communication patterns, we discard them." "Spataro said. Instead, they found a way to get people to mingle with their work.

"I think the number of emails can be effectively reduced," he added. As time goes on, incremental innovation can bring different habits to people, and we're not saying that e-mail will die out immediately because we'll get new mail. What people really need is to connect these tools, and if you can provide them with a good experience, then users will be able to choose the best way to use them. ”

"I think it's really possible to connect these tools to each other in an online context without many negative effects," said Pisony, chief technical officer at Yammer. We don't want more spam and a long list of CC's. ”

But we do receive a lot of corporate mail at the moment. We still seem to be stuck in the communication channel of email, perhaps Bock is right, change to go from top to bottom, and need excellent social and collaborative tools to interact.

Through the evolution of corporate social systems and collaborative tools, we find that building powerful tools is not enough, and these tools need to be integrated into the work experience to bring real change. At least for now, that means e-mail is still an important part of people's work.