Moving Beyond Email -- Barriers to Knowledge Management

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Some of the problems with email that I'm considering:

• Disparate list-serv communities: an email list is a commonly-used tool for asking questions and posting interesting news items about a topic. Let's I'm a member of two lists: "Cancer Research" and "Hadoop Programming." If I find an interesting news item about how some university is using Hadoop to speed their Oncology research, I'm going to send it to both lists. The ensuing discussions, however, take place in two isolated bubbles (assuming the list memberships are not exactly the same, which, given the topics, would be exceedingly unlikely). Email has become a barrier to communication between groups.
• Inability to measure reputation: let's return to the "Hadoop Programming" list. This time, I post a question to just that one list. Some people send back some very useful responses (it's an active list with very intelligent members, after all). After some on-list discussion of the merits of each solution, I come up with an approach. Six months later, a manager needs to find some Hadoop geniuses for a new project. If email archives are available, she can search through them, but she's an MBA not an engineer, so she has no way of evaluating who the quality thinkers are on the list. A site like StackOverflow, where the experts in the field judge one another and thus give one another reputation points, solves this problem.
• Collaborative editing: the "College Hiring Team" decides they want to send out a memo to the whole company asking for people to come to their upcoming "Lunch and Learn" event. At the planning meeting, Jerry volunteers to write a draft. He does so and emails it out to the group. Sally and Vipin each make some constructive edits and email out their own drafts. Who is in charge of merging those changes? What happens if Vipin also sends his draft to his friend Emiglia, a professional copywriter? Where does she send her draft? This problem would be addressed by having an easy-to-use version control system that is consistently used by the whole company. The GAO has exactly such a system: nobody stores documents on their hard drives; they always check out and in all material from a central repository, with all versions kept for archival purposes. The GAO is an interesting case since, as auditors, the decision to use a central repository probably had much more to do with a need for audit trails and accountability than with frustration of merging edits.

I also want to talk about some of the barriers to moving away from email, including convenience, threading, enterprise support (including legal and regulatory requirements), and sheer habit.

 

If I have time to research or run some case studies between now and the conference, I'd love to talk about successes and failures of organizations' efforts to move away from email. This would be a great addition to my talk, but I make no promises.

A coworker just sent me the following. Information assurance is another area where email presents challenges. (Of course, email does have a benefit in the IA arena: corporations have generally figured out how to archive emails for auditing and other purposes; this is less true for websites.)

"I find the most common culprits for accidental information leakage are reply-all and address auto-complete in email. I would guess I have experienced (as a sender and receiver) an order of magnitude more mishaps through these mechanisms than for all other accidental releases combined.

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