Instant messaging and its impact on e-mail and collaboration

Adam Gartsberg has blogged Mike Rodin’s Town Hall. I feel a bit like I’m reporting something third-hand but never mind, perhaps that’s what blogging is about.

There are some really interesting observations that concur with some of mine:

We think the idea of innovation is all about collaboration.  We’ve connected everyone together.  Think about how you work today, what you came in and did this morning.  What are the first things you did this morning – probably log onto Notes and bring up your buddy list.  Or maybe not in that order.  For me, it’s primarily the buddy list.  I use e-mail today the way I used [interoffice] mail when I started 20 years ago – maybe I check it once a day or so.  IM is my primary business tool.
What’s your primary mode of communication?  (Polled the audience of 200-300 people)

• e-Mail?  [I only saw 1 or 2 hands go up]
• Phone? [About the same]
• Sametime?  [Almost whole room]

If this is really how this presentation went, then there is a good deal of suggestion in the question, having already told them his answer. I assume that when he is talking “Sametime?” that he is primarily talking about IM type capabilities, but I could well be completely wrong there.

If I ask myself the same question “What’s your primary mode of communication?” then the answer is “it depends”.

• If I want a quick answer to something I’ll use an IM client
• I have as many phone conversations as I do IM conversations.
• Many IM conversations get converted into phone conversations.
• I rarely send files over my IM clients because, like me, people want them in their e-mail. It’s also rare that I send a file to one person, I’m normally sending it to a group of people.

Don’t get me wrong here, IM has radically changed the way I work and I’m a big fan, but I’m only a fan of the correct use of IM. There is still a lot of life in e-mail though. Which brings me on to the other interesting part (for me):

There’s a generation coming up where these tools – MySpace, Facebook, YouTube – are central to how they live.  A friend’s daughter left for college, and knew the majority of students before her first day on campus.  People we’re hiring think this way.  When we give them an e-mail client, they think “e-mail is for my grandfather.”  It’s not how they think, not how they work.  We’re creating a set of tools for the next generation of workers.

I was doing some problem solving on my son’s PC yesterday (with iTunes). While I was there I was a nosey parent and decided to look at his e-mail. Turns out that he hadn’t checked his e-mail for more than two weeks. There was a good deal of new e-mail in there, but it was nearly all SPAM. I’ve written before about this generation and their expectations of the workplace as have others. I’m still to understand how we create a workplace that has all of these tools, but is still productive. There is a difference between work and play. When you work you have to produce something, when you play you don’t. Employers aren’t going to pay people to play without it producing anything. But provide some of these capabilities is exactly what we are going to have to do.