Email is so over
By Morley Winograd
In the 1980s a powerful
new communication tool
invaded corporate life.
It undermined hierarchy,
expanded communication
channels and enabled
huge gains in
productivity. The
technology was email and
its arrival aroused
great concerns about
security and authority
in C suites everywhere.
Older leaders refused to
use the technology, or
at best, told their
secretaries to treat it
like regular mail,
handing it to them
printed on paper in
their daily inbox.
Younger workers, from
the Baby Boom
Generation, judged the
skill of their bosses
based upon their
willingness to
communicate in email.
Boomers also used the
technology to create
peer networks where they
exchanged information
about job opportunities
and plotted how best to
make over organizations
they found hide bound
and hopelessly out of
touch with modern
technology. Today,
Boomers are in charge,
email is a ubiquitous
part of corporate life,
even following workers
home on their smart
phones, and no one
questions its
effectiveness and
efficiency.
No one that is except
Millennials, born
between 1982 and 2003,
who are now entering the
workforce in numbers
greater than even the
Baby Boom Generation did
three and four decades
ago. The comfort and
facility of Millennials
in the use of Internet
communication
technologies has led
many to call people of
their age “digital
natives,” ready to text
or tweet each moment of
their young lives.
Turning the libertarian,
individual autonomy
values of the Internet’s
creators upside down,
Millennials have used
social networks to bring
their friends, and the
rest of the world,
closer in communities
bound together by common
interests, not
geography. Having
transformed educational
and entertainment
institutions by
insisting on the primacy
of peer-to-peer
communications, the
first wave of
Millennials is now
entering the workforce
and bringing their
communication technology
revolution with them.
For Millennials, email
is a slow, old-fashioned
way of communicating,
lacking the immediacy
and transparency of
Instant Messaging (IM).
Facebook provides a much
more robust way to
organize Millennial’s
daily dialogue and life
(which are the same
thing for this
generation), than MS
Outlook even when its on
a Blackberry. Facebook
also has the weakest
functionality of any
email system in the
market, which hasn’t
stopped it from becoming
the de facto contact
management system for
most Millennials. The
generation uses social
networks to explore
ideas on how to solve
any problem presented to
them with all of their
friends and can’t
imagine limiting those
questions to only those
working in the same
company, any more than
they can abide China
attempting to censor
Google searches.
So what has been the
reaction of most
corporate CIOs to this
phenomenon? Much of it
resembles the response
to email by corporate
executives thirty years
ago. Citing security
risks and the need to
protect corporate
intellectual property,
the use of social
networks is routinely
restricted or prohibited
out right. Older bosses
sneer at anyone on
Facebook, suggesting it
is a drain on
productivity and a
threat to personal
privacy. IMing is
permitted, so long as it
is done within corporate
guidelines, but its
inability to convey
Microsoft Office
attachments makes it
less likely to be used
in decision-making
discussions. Meanwhile,
the potential gains in
creativity and
innovation that would
come from having each
employee incorporate the
ideas of hundreds of
their friends in
actively solving the
company’s problems are
ignored. Cut off from
the constant chatter of
texts and homemade
video, corporate
hierarchies are as
clueless about what this
generation is thinking
as Boomer bosses were
decades ago.
But this kind of
outmoded behavior will
also fade away. Over the
next decade, all of the
Millennial generation
will come of age.
Members of the
generation will
represent one out of
every three adult
Americans by 2020.
Corporations that wish
to survive, let alone
succeed, will have to
align their governance
practices and technology
architectures to
accommodate the way this
emerging generation
works.
In a decade or so, CIO’s
will look back at this
time of transition and
smile at the antiquated
way business was
transacted before mobile
computing and social
networks became
commonplace. For those
old enough to remember,
it will seem very
similar to the way
business was transformed
by another, now
obsolete, technology,
email. Millennials and
their Internet based
communication
technologies will have
disrupted corporate
life, devolving power to
the edges of the
organization and
creating a more
group-oriented,
transparent culture in
tune with the
generation’s beliefs. As
a result, companies will
be much more successful
than they are today and
the country’s economy
will be a lot better
than it is now.
