here’s a posting about using email for collaboration. or rather why is there such resistance to using collaborative software tools instead of email which lots of us would agree isn’t the most productive tool. and why do people revert back to email even after using software?

fyi, this posting is from a collaboration software company blog. they decided to look for what’s good with email and found:

- it’s easy to use (we all know how it works, we’re used to it)
- it’s universal (we all know how it works & it works for everyone. it’s not platform or software dependant)
- it’s accessible anywhere
- it can be personalised (personalised in terms of who you cc or bcc or what priority u put on the email)
- it’s managable & configurable (it’s easy to set up filters and manage ur email)
- it’s searchable
- it’s in your face (u can’t get away from it)
- it just works (this was more of a summary… easy to learn, get started quickly, etc)

i was reading case studies at basecamp the other day and one of the questions asked was how using basecamp has effected their email usage. i think every study i read said they previously used email as their primary mode of communication and now that they use basecamp, that usage has dropped significantly.

email was used by 100% of the companies that participated in my thesis research. i don’t think anyone would find that surprising with a virtual team. email usage ranged between 12% and 75% across the teams. this also didn’t surprise me.

what did surprise me was the slowness to incorporate newer technologies (especially as 50% of teams were in the IT industry). none of the teams used blogs (either reading a team members or writing their own). none used application sharing. none used shared whiteboards. none incorporated member profiles. none used videophones.

that’s not to say it was ALL email usage. two teams used a wiki (30% usage for one team and 5% for the other). collaborative software was used by one team 55% of the time. yahoo groups (or other group software like google groups) was used by two teams (60% and 10% of each team’s usage).

i did not ask what sort of planning went into technology decisions. with the top 3 communication methods being email (email and email with attachments), IM and phone (individual and conference phone calls but not VOIP calls), i suggest there isn’t much or any planning on technologies and our mindset doesn’t expand much beyond those 3. or perhaps we just don’t have time to plan. whatever the reason, this isn’t very good news for software vendors.

there is enough research and experience out there for us to know email has its faults – everyone has experienced being misunderstood in an email. so why do we cling to it so tightly? the list above answers that question to some degree but i don’t think delves deep enough. and btw, none of the items above are hard to work thru in a collaboration software IMO.

there’s a few things that come to mind but i’m starting to feel exhausted and feeling like a ramble may be coming so i’ll just concentrate on one other reason: privacy. community moderators are familiar with the idea of the ‘back channel’ which is when you talk outside the normal community way (using IM person to person instead of posting in the group). back channel communication is all about privacy. sometimes we don’t want to say something to the entire group. sometimes we’re shy about putting forth an issue to the entire group and want to float it to one person first. sometimes we’re just not sure what the protocol is with discussing something. i think this is one of the reasons email is good. the question is how do you maintain that privacy but not lose the ideas if they are needed later? that’s a question for vendors to incorporate!!

what are the other ways email is good or bad in how we use it to collaborate?