What a ridiculous thought. Or is it? A French Company is doing just that http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-12-04/tech/30473966_1_abc-news-internal-emails-messages-employees

We all know that valuable information gets stuck and then lost in emails. And we know that email attachments cause duplication and confusion over what’s current.  And now with eDiscovery, emails are a huge liability to a firm not to mention storage and back up of emails—another huge cost to any business.

So could your firm live without email. It is truly an intriguing idea.  

The French firm is replacing email with a FaceBook-like tool and instant messaging. Would this be enough and would it solve the problems emails present today?

What tools could you use to replace email? I agree a FaceBook-like tool (although I would use LinkedIn as my example) would do a great job of capturing employee details – contact info, project experience, and skills. And the tool would be self-managed so the data should always be up-to-date. Instant messaging would help particularly in a dispersed setting – imagine an employee getting an answer to a question within perhaps seconds instead of searching and waiting for responses.  But like email, I fear instant messaging will hoard and bury critical knowledge.

Ideally, any collaboration and communication tool needs to be mined for its valuable data. The information in instant messaging would need to be auto tagged and stored in manner so others can find and use it quickly.

In my ideal world, I can see every project having a dedicated site where all communication and collaboration could take place, be retained and mined later for reuse. And each employee assigned to the project would be linked to their profiles. The same would hold true when working with clients. One place (site) where you capture all communication and collaboration and all without email!

A world without email…quite an interesting thought!