Walled Gardens

I love this recent entry in the CentralDesktop Blog.

The entry writes about "The Bad in Email", and states that email is a horrible collaboration tool because it creates "walled gardens" or "silos" within organizations. Without summarizing the article too much, the reason for the walled gardens is that a person's inbox is not shared with their teams.

This concept is music to my ears. We (at Parlano) have been saying for years that email is an ineffective collaboration solution. In fact, we regularly point to customers who state that the use of Persistent Group Messaging (a real collaboration solution) has reduced their internal email traffic by 50-80%. The reason? Because people quickly realize many of the points written in the above blog. It is so much easier to sort through massive amounts of communications when you can go straight to a topic that is interesting to you rather than having to scroll through hundreds of emails in your inbox. Anyone who has sent me an email recently knows how I deal with this... the emails end up getting lost and eventually deleted (sorry).

What I also found interesting were the comments about how email is insecure. This is interesting becuase in Financial Services the security reviews of our products are always very intense (we have been in the business for a long time so we pass with flying colors). But we frequently scratch our heads because the same types of reviews aren't applied to email systems. What's the point of encrypting all IM and Chat data if all of the email sent around the universe is un-encrypted? Eventually the tide will turn and email will need to become secure, or more likely reduced and/or shut-off in favor of a better solution. But my guess is that the end-users will beat the security teams to the punch and will opt to switch to a different paradigm such as IM and/or Persistent Group Messaging.

Comments

[Mike Persaud]

There are many examples of walled gardens in technology and few have survived in their original form. Take AOL, they brought the Internet home but within walls. DoCoMo brought high speed wireless technology to their home market and made it extremely difficult for choice in the region... until now. AOL has opened up and now so has DoCoMo. Email as you quite rightly state is a walled garden and even worse creates corporate silos.

For a few years now, I've been trying to work at reducing the use of email for many reasons, some of which you highlight and my original plan was to deploy instant messaging. However, as the rate of change has increased, I've accepted that IM is not the replacement, but merely an additional collaboration tool in the suite that will reduce the use and dependency on email.

I don't believe encryption is the answer either, especially in a corporate environment, because this creates complexity especially when regulated across boundaries. I suspect the secure email platforms (controlled by white-lists) is the answer to replacing what we know as low signal to noise corporate email. I call this concept the 'bat-phone'. The secure, highly audited platform for regulated personnel within regulated organizations. There are few solutions out there and such a solution at this stage is likely to be a culture shock and therefore fail immediately. We [the corporate end users]need to assist the manufactures in creating the next generation messaging platform and that means integrating with existing technologies to make change easy to embrace and not force change because of regulations and threats.