Is email dying?

“Email is dying, isn’t it” blog post was originally published on Jakamo Official Blog on March 10, 2014, and is still highly topical.

There has been a lot of discussion and speculation about the future of our dear work mate called email. How many emails do you receive daily to your inbox? And how many emails do you write during a working day? That’s right, writing an email is our most common routine to collaborate with other people.

During the past 20 years, the business environment has moved heavily towards relational business. The progress is still on-going. Relational business is based on cooperation, especially cross-company cooperation. Today, most of our emails are sent between people over company boundaries.

Email has a strong position as the main written information channel. It is strong, even though people are frustrated with the swarm of emails they receive daily. I’m sure you’ve heard some of your co-workers saying: I have to go through my email. It’ll take a couple of hours. Some companies have created a rule that you’re not allowed to open your email before afternoon. Great rule by the way. Gets things done as planned in the morning.

I think that email’s biggest problem is the lack of transparency that is needed in cross-company cooperation. A lot of emails with tons of information are sent between people in different companies. When one person leaves or changes the position, the valuable information disappears. This is one of the challenges we have faced again and again in industrial business relations during the past decade.

In my opinion, email, as a communication channel is not going to die, it will remain, but its role and nature in business cooperation will soon dramatically change. Email doesn’t suit transparent cross-company information management – it doesn’t create a structured information history, it doesn’t have automatically a context and it isn’t a secure way to share and handle confidential information. Vertical industry-specific platforms such as Jakamo have solved this problem.