French firm eschews e-mails for IMs, custom interface

Written by

Susanna Kim for ABC News, (via Yahoo):

You’ve got mail–not. Employees of tech company Atos will be banned from sending emails under the company’s new “zero email” policy.

CEO Thierry Breton of the French information technology company said only 10 percent of the 200 messages employees receive per day are useful and 18 percent is spam. That’s why he hopes the company can eradicate internal emails in 18 months, forcing the company’s 74,000 employees to communicate with each other via instant messaging and a Facebook-style interface.

It’s an interesting, and somewhat bizarre, concept – a rather extreme solution to the omnipresent issue of workplace spam. This isn’t a startup company trying this on a lark, either. Atos is a multi-billion dollar multinational with offices in 42 countries.


  • http://www.smiley-dread.com kiil

    Repost — your sites comments appears not to have withstand the server transfer.

    An anecdote: I had worked as an e-mail consultant for an entity with over 5000 mail accounts. Not much as compared to multi-internationals which have accounts that rise to hundred of thousands and more. Their biggest source of headaches was managing storage.

    It turns out that most electronic communication is internal — usually with-in ones own department or division — and consisted of documents being sent back and forth. Thats the problem; Outlook/Exchange is being used as a substitute for file sharing, storage, and as document archival and retrieval systems. Departments were even setting up common public folder areas which mirrored their networked shares. 

    User A would ask her officemate if she could have document XYZ. User B says “No problem. I’ll send it in a ‘mail.” User A then opens XYZ directly from the e-mail, reads and review with perhaps a change or two. Saves it (hopefully remembering to change its path from “USERTemp”. Then uses Word’s “send with e-mail”  macro to send it back to User B or to their higher-ups. Repeat, rinse and dry. Multiple copies and revisions of the same document spread all over a company’s infrastructure. A nightmare.

    Ian

  • Anonymous

    Ian hits the nail on the head.  Unfortunately, the solution is not easy, as it involves changing behaviors.  Issues like this make me wonder how many large organizations think they would be better off with typewriters in place of computers.