"Don't charge the email hill first"

One of the more memorable quotes from the Enterprise 2.0 conference.  I attended a couple of the speaking sessions and the one Wednesday moderated by Wikinomics author Don Tapscott was pretty good.  This conference spent its time focusing on ways to collaborate other than email. 

Although a really compelling business case for a new collaboration tool remains elusive (yes, I know, "productivity" but that is darn hard to build a direct ROI around and even harder to pry IT dollars for), there are lots of alternatives floating around out there.  One of the more compelling is the type of thing Socialtext is doing (and even Wetpaint locally in Seattle to a degree) - putting wikis in the hands of business users.  Long the domain of techies as that is how I first participated in one when one of the engineers graciously invited the "marketing guy" to the party (thanks Mitchell).  Putting a non-tech user front end on them and making them easier to use for average folks shows promise, but you are still trying to change people's habits.  Daunting for sure.

It is always fun to think forward and there are no shortage of great ideas, compelling technologies, and really smart people coming at this problem/opportunity.  Here at MessageGate we are in the weeds of corporate email which is what people are using now for these interactions and will be for some time (end-user habits die hard...and with a fair share of bloodshed).

On the panel Wednesday was Joe Schueller from Procter & Gamble - they are doing some really innovative things around building a community to drive product innovation.  More on this session here, here, and here.

Joe is the one that said this and warned the audience to not fight this battle first because "people have a personal relationship with their email" and if you try to take it from them you will be viewed with disdain.  His advice is to start small with a pilot group (like IT) who can champion the benefits of a new way to interact and measure them (refer to point above about ROI & spend).

So, what to do about email?  How do you actively control/manage something people view personally?  Very carefully.  This is why we advocate a minimum threshold approach.  Forget about technology/software out of the gate, do an audit whether you use MessageGate or somebody else - you need to do one.  This will show you the places where you can think about applying some of these new technologies or show you where your investment in them is not paying off.

As a side note, all the sessions are available via video here.