email not dead shocker

A friend of mine called me last week and said she was thinking of setting up an online community for a group of female entrepreneurs. What should she use? Well, we had a chat and what do you think we came up with?

A blog, a wiki, a Facebook group, a Ning site?

No - an email list. An oldie but a goodie. These people aren't tech-savvy and email is their primary form of communication. I've ranted about email before but in this situation it kinda makes sense (for now).

enterprise 2.0 presentation

Here is the presentation from yesterday's conference.

E2point04ip

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Some notes to go with the presentation:

• This is a revised draft of this presentation I created back in April - with slides 23-28 owing a heavy debt to Patrick Lambe's rewrite.
• The email detox podcasts with Luis Suarez & co: Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3.
• The five steps are: i. ban attachments & instead link to files sitting in a more permanent location; ii. if an email conversation involves more than 5 people then shift it elsewhere, iii. make your tools as simple to use as possible, iv. encourage role modelling of good behaviours by senior staff, v. begin with a small step in the right direction rather than trying to change the world in one go.
• The 5 issues to consider are: i. security. email is insecure anyway but you need to clearly establish access guidelines for each location where documents are stored, ii. privacy with new tools is important - e.g. staff need to understand how public their discussions will be, iii. develop an archiving / retention policy for your documentation, iv. do not hit staff members with too many tools, they could be overwhelmed with choice, v. consider different IP options for ownership of content esp. if consumers are involved.
• The Cynefin framework is introduced because social software adoption is complex (lots of interacting agents, inherently unpredictable) rather than simple or complicated. Waterfall approaches do not work. More on Cynefin here: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/423/kurtz.html
• The final page concerned drama triangles. There will be a blog post on this topic soon.

podcast - luis/patrick/alex - email detox (3): tools or solutions?

Download the final part of the email detox podcast.

• 00:00 - Alex agrees with Luis on email politics.
• 01:20 - Humans as political animals - in public or in private?
• 03:00 - Should we be selling tools or solutions?
• 06:00 - Applying social software to business problems.
• 08:00 - The email detox workout video.
• 10: 00 - Wrap up & next steps.

Get Part 1 & Part 2.

podcast - luis/patrick/alex - email detox (2): infrastructure & politics

Following on from the last post.

Download Part 2 now (20:23, 4.8 Mb)

• 00:00 - Patrick raises the infrastructure question.
• 03:00 - Luis brings up wikis.
• 04:10 - Luis talks about discussing the detox with his team.
• 07:55 - The laziness issue.
• 09:00 - Do we love email?
• 10:00 - Alex mentions email overload.
• 11:00 - Generational issues.
• 13:00 - Patrick raises the politics question.
• 15:00 - Luis busts the whole thing wide open.

podcast - luis/patrick/alex - email detox (1)

I had the pleasure of conversing with Luis, Patrick & Alex about Luis's email detox programme. Here is the first part (of three) for your listening pleasure.

Download Part 1 now (16:48, 4.0Mb)

• 01:00 - Luis describes his email detox moment in 2007.
• 03:10 - Luis challenges his email correspondents within IBM.
• 06:10 - How do you bring people round to the post-email world?
• 11:00 - Where is email appropriate?
• 13:00 - Instant messaging & social networking.