Weird, huh? How can a mail client help me collaborate without email ? That's the magic of composite applications!
First, a little history. When I joined IBM 6+ years ago, my goal was to always have a "no-scroll inbox" meaning that the inbox within my mail client (i.e. Lotus Notes) could not scroll (even when the application was maximized). I had to read an email and file it immediately into its proper folder (or tag it and archive it if I'm using my personal email over at Gmail).
Anyway, I considered myself pretty successful at that project up until May of this year. With Lotus Connections v2 out the door and all the buzz/press generated after the Microsoft smackdown at Enterprise 2.0, I got too many emails in too little time. Today, I'm finally at that point again. My inbox (with Lotus Notes fully maximized) doesn't scroll!!
I'm looking to follow the footsteps of Luis Suarez and his quest to stop using email. Unlike my counterpart in Spain (or in the Netherlands.. I never know where he is), I'm taking a slightly different approach to this "no email" experiment: I'm not educating people to collaborate with me in a certain way. Instead, I wanted to see if people would follow me.
Unfortunately, I wasn't as smart as my counterpart in Spain. It didn't occur to me to keep hard data on the number of emails I receive on a weekly basis. I can tell you this, however, my email traffic has significantly decreased since I've started using social software, specifically blogs and social bookmarking. I remember when I used to get 100+ emails a day including ~30 over the weekend, and dozens over lunch 
. 3 months ago I was down to about 35 emails a day. Today, I just got 13 emails and 0 during lunch!! So it's definitely working... social software really does help me replace email!!
To me, it's clear that people know how to get my intellectual capital (mostly through my blogs and bookmarks) and as I keep sharing my success stories, they follow me, without me formerly educating them (although you may argue that I'm educating them through my blog...
)
Today, I mostly depend on two main applications: a Feed Reader (NetNewsWire) and my mail client (Lotus Notes v8.5 -- the public beta). My feed reader is my new inbox. Just like my good friend Mr. Suarez, I love the feed reader because I can easily choose what I want to read and what's important to me at any given time. If, after a while, a thread gets boring or doesn't provide any value, I can unsubscribe and off I go. In the meantime, I'm "as smart" as the other person I'm subscribing to, just a couple of minutes later 
(like my friend Laurisa Rodriguez says).
So, since I'm barely using email, what's the purpose of using an email client? Well, it's for everything else! Lotus Notes 8 is my:
- Instant messaging client (including for my Gtalk, Yahoo! and AOL friends)
- Productivity suite (Word processor, Presentation editor, and spreadsheet via the embedded Lotus Symphony)
- Twitter client (by using a 3rd party plugin)
- Calendar
- Address Book
- Lotus Connections Activities client
- Connection to fellow community members via the Lotus Connections Communities and Broadcast Suite plug-in
- Access to my Quickr libraries
Today, I installed 3 very useful plug-ins:
- Cisco Unified Messaging - which lets me visualize my voicemail and provides phone awareness (I can literally see if someone has their phone off the hook or is available for a quick call)
- BeeAware - Which lets me change my Beehive status
- BeeFriend - which lets me easily add my Sametime contacts as friends in Beehive
I think we have to be careful to not say this is an either/or proposition. E-mail continues to be immensely useful, and thousands of IBM customers depend on IBM to provide the best-in-class product for the corporate e-mail market. We can help customers maximize the effectiveness of their use of e-mail as a tool by showing what the whole desktop of the future should be like, with e-mail just as one component.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I don't believe in RSS-as-substitute makes you more productive. When I used RSS frequently, I felt like a slave to it just as much as to e-mail. Sure, I didn't have to open the body as often to see whether I needed to read something, but otherwise, the metaphor is exactly the same. And I struggled to keep up. Now I use push, planet sites, searches, etc. to let me know what I want to read.... good news is, all of that comes into my Notes client as well.
Dissapointing to see Notes basically used as a portal and e-mail.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if IBMers don't see value in Notes beyond that, what future the Notes client has.
What a *superb* blog post, Luis! Thanks much for putting it together and for sharing with everyone your own experience of how you are re-purposing the many e-mails you were getting on a daily basis! This is some really really good stuff and the fact that you are showing / demonstrating how to achieve this through using a Mac just makes me even more excited! Well done! I will certainly be blogging about your article adding further up some more commentary! Thanks for the wonderful write-up though!
ReplyDeleteEd, I think it is an interesting perception you are mentioning with either / or proposition, because what both Luis and myself are doing is not replacing e-mail with social networking tools. At least, on the sense you are indicating. What we are trying to do is to say, once and for all, how e-mail does not need to be used for EVERYTHING! On the contrary, it needs to be re-purposed and used for what it was meant to be: a 1:1 conversation of a confidential / sensitive nature. Everything else should go out of it and into much more open and collaborative spaces. Nothing to do with either / or, but more with re-purposing it successfully and as a result become much more productive.
I agree with you that e-mail still has got its value and there is no way it is going to disappear any time soon, but I think you cannot deny the fact of bad it is as a collaboration and knowledge sharing tool. I mean, here is a quick question for you, how many billions of USD have different businesses lost because they have facilitated "bad" collaboration and knowledge sharing habits flowing through e-mail vs. other much more open, collaborative and corporate repositories, and not just talking about 2.0 social tools.
With regards to the RSS feed reader comments, let me say that the metaphor, as you put it, is NOT the same. Actually, quite the opposite. And big time! People who constantly struggle to keep their feed readers down to zero for their unread items are just behaving with the same kind of addiction as what they had with e-mail. Just because an item arrives into your feed reader it doesn't necessarily mean you would need to read it. And if you do, you are just going to run into the same trouble.
The key message from the RSS feed reader, vs. your e-mail Inbox is that with the first one, the content is ALREADY out there and plenty others can benefit from it. In your e-mail it is just you and perhaps one or two others or a small group. That is the main key difference. How content is much more accessible for re-use than through e-mail. Massive difference, imo, if you come to think how interactions can take place without you from all over the place, something that you cannot do through e-mail. It is always triggered by you, and no-one else, specially when you are the one on the To: field and someone delegates their task(s) on you.
I strongly feel that Luis sets quite nicely the ground for the next wave of Innovation taking place in Notes 8. I remember for many many years of being a Notes power user how we all use to say that Notes was just so much more than e-mail client and, boy, is it now a brilliant time and opportunity to prove that to everyone! Both Luis and myself just shared how we feel such rampant innovation could take place. That's all. Time for Notes 8 to reflect on where it would want to position itself and how it would want to continue being the leading market in providing a solution that works just "Outside the Inbox!"
Carl, interesting comments, must confess, and to be honest I'd rather prefer to be using Notes as a portal with very little e-mail interactions that a clunky piece of software that struggles to just keep up with the simple task of handling e-mail ;-)
Besides how open, public, transparent, in short, social, can you be with e-mail as your only choice for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Isn't that a little bit limiting? ...
Luis: "Besides how open, public, transparent, in short, social, can you be with e-mail as your only choice for collaboration and knowledge sharing. Isn't that a little bit limiting? ..."
ReplyDeleteThat's my point. If IBM is using Notes just for email, then they're missing it's power. If IBM can't use the power of Notes then what hope do customers have?
Many many moons ago, when Lotus also sold cc:Mail, we would actively tell customers not to use Notes as email, as Notes (back then) was a terribly architected mail system, but Notes back then (and now) was great at doing what are now called social network application.
Hi Carl! Thanks for following up! Oh, nice, I actually think that we are very much in agreement. Both Luis and myself are commenting that Notes offers plenty of potential, which we are both exploiting to its fullest, by using the client to do much more stuff than e-mail. Luis' brief description of how he uses it on the Mac is the clear direction of where Notes needs to move to differentiate itself in the market as plenty more than just e-mail, and to your point, I do hope it does!
ReplyDeletePlenty of us inside IBM have been using it like that for years and we wouldn't have it any other way. And with Notes 8 things are about to get much easier with folks putting together their own composite apps. for themselves and whatever other end-users!
Thanks for the comments and glad we are in agreement, at least, from what I understood from your last comment :-)
@ed Thanks for the clarification! Yes, I'm in NO WAY proposing completely replacing email with RSS/Atom feeds and did not want that to be the point of this entry. Instead, I'm using social software to re-purpose how I use email! Ah by reducing the noise produced by email (mostly through unnecessary 'Reply to All' and massive attachments) I can do my job more effectively!
ReplyDeleteAs an example, because my email traffic has decreased so much, it has allowed me to create more intellectual capital for IBM. Thereby, I believe, IBM is getting more bang for their buck :). In fact, I would like to believe that I had a part in the awesome Q2 results posted by Lotus recently :).
For me, an email always takes precedence over a feed reader. But if it doesn't have any confidential information, then it should be shared.
And don't get me wrong as I said, I still live 50% of my time within Lotus Notes 8. And because of Lotus Notes' extensibility via plugins I can do my work and reply to emails using the same email client! It's just that now I get a lot less email and spend more time using other power features of Lotus Notes 8.
@carl I'm confused with your comments.. they seem to contradict each other?! :(
@Luis, anxious to see your blog on this!
Luis, excellent post !!
ReplyDeleteI agree with all of you: you, Ed, Carl and Luis S. - social tools will probably replace the inbox in the future, but for corporations that's still a very distant future. Other than technology it's also a question of culture and education (bigger challenge), and most people these days are working inside their inbox. They're not even using IM...
Personally I'm a strong advocate of social tools, both inside and outside IBM, that would help reduce the number of emails I get each day (probably around 30-40). Still, it's different when working with customers and BPs, that rely mostly on emails. I do link to slideshare files, post to del.icio.us a lot and we have some BPs connected to our Sametime gateway (which saves A LOT of phones/emails), but most people feel more comfortable within their inbox.
I can say I'm doing my best to educate everyone (colleagues, BPs and customers), on both culture and technology.
Only time will tell if I was successful...
Great comments, Dvir! I keep thinking that perhaps most businesses are still trapped in the e-mail world because we are making the job far too easy for them, without any involvement from their side, nor willingness to find better ways to collaborate and share knowledge across the board. Not a chance of getting them to co-share part of the responsibility of working together and when that happens obviously e-mail seems to be like the perfect tool! Why? Because it doesn't require a single level of interaction and involvement from the other side!
ReplyDeleteHowever, what would happen if we would spend time with customers and clients and effectively demonstrate to them how to be more productive, much more collaborative and knowledge sharing prone by making use of tools like Lotus Greenhouse, Lots Bluehouse, Sametime, Notes 8, etc. etc. etc. Don't you think that customers would want to jump into a different innovation bandwagon than whatever they may have been doing all along?
Yes, businesses may take a bit of time coming on board of all of these social software tools, but if it takes longer than expected I think it'd be us the guilty ones for not helping accelerate their adoption by filling up the gaps we all know exist out there... Just my two cents worth of comments...
PS. Luis, tocayo, my blog post on the topic may take a couple of days, since I will be on the road again for the next couple of days, but it will eventually get there heh
@Luis, you are now making me feel guilty for not educating my customers :(. Perhaps customers need more education because they don't work with me on a daily basis? IBMers, I presume, follow my example because they get to see periodically how it is that I collaborate.
ReplyDeleteSo to educate my customers I need them to get hooked to your blog and my blog's feed. This is giving me an idea for another blog entry...
P.S. No worries.. I'll be in the lookout!
Hi Luis! And not just that! Now that we have got robust opportunities like Lotus Greenhouse and Lotus Bluehouse, I think we stand a pretty good chance of helping folks get educated on how to become much more productive without e-mail. That's why I am starting to become much heavier in my usage of Bluehouse as I am getting more and more exposed to customers. And then perhaps Greenhouse.
ReplyDeleteBut certainly opportunities like those, the blogs, Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us / ma.gnolia, etc. etc. are good places to help them get an extended education ;-) heh
Looking forward to that other upcoming blog post!
luis, i do agree that social software really does help replace email, and not only that, but being so simple and "social" it helps create conversations and ideas that would not have been possible thru phone or email. that is the richness of this method.
ReplyDeletehowever...you are only able to do this as long as your co-workers, family, friends, etc. are also into the whole social software thing. in my personal inbox, i still receive emails from some family members that just don't understand the benefit of using social software tools vs. sending an email. i really get pissed off when i receive an email from them...
also, it is important for your company to realize this value and to promote its use. in my company, they blocked all use of instant messaging, facebook, youtube, etc etc...it really sucks. we were highly productive with those tools. their excuse is that due to federal laws they need to record all emails from 3 to 10 years...and it is more difficult to do this with social software. in my opinion, neither the company executives nor all employees are educated on the real value of social software.
Chica,
ReplyDeleteYou clearly get it! Sounds like you should be the evangelizer of social software within your company. Though if they recently blocked instant messaging you'll have a long way to go.
My advice is to start with your friends and just bring up a hypothetical scenario: "wouldn't it be great if we had the freeness to record our thoughts and openly discuss new ideas with other employees across the enterprise?".
It's interesting that they use a federal law as an excuse. But if I read it correctly, the law requires employers to record their employees data for 3-10 years? And you know what ? I completely agree that this would be very difficult, if not impossible, to do if employees use social tools outside of the firewall. But that's reason enough to bring social software inside the enterprise!! In fact, as discussed earlier, your fellow co-workers are probably using proxies to go outside and socialize.
Oh, and don't worry, we are certainly promoting it heavily within our company. In fact, Luis Suarez is one of our evangelists inside IBM.
@la chica, my goodness! You surely live and breathe the social computing movement! Don't let them put you down just like that! Keep fighting! One of the things that certain businesses do seem to be missing the point with, and big time!, is the fact that whether they like it or not, their employees are going to continue making use of these social software tools in order to reach out and connect with others. And whether they keep blocking their usage or not, people will still find their way around to make extensive use of them.
ReplyDeleteSo a key question for your business would be along the lines of do you want your employees to engage with other knowledge workers outside of your company, and without your involvement, to learn and collaborate with other knowledge workers about their company's knowledge without having a sense of "controlling" the environment (With that involvement) or would you rather engage and provide such environment for your employees to keep driving your innovation into new levels?
In short, which side do you want to be? A labour based company or a knowledge based one? A company from the 20th century or one that will last way into the 21st century?
*Their* choice, for sure, but glad you are on the one from where *you* are going to keep benefiting the most! Like I said, keep fighting! You are not alone ;-) heh