|
Their was a fascinating article recently in the Wall Street Journal ("Rage
Against the Machine,"Thursday October 8, Opinion Page, available online by
subscription only) by David Gelernter, professor of Computer Science at Yale.
(If you wanted to read more about Gelernter and some of his ideas he has an
entry in Digerati here.)
I waited to write about it because it really startled me at first and it took
a while to digest. Here's the first paragraph:
"I hate our computers. Our core software tools are old; not only are
they old but they are obsolete; and not only are they
obsolete but they were never that great to begin with." (Emphasis
is all his)
Gelernter takes aim at 4 technologies that he says contain fatal
flaws: The file system, email, the desktop user interface and the Web. He has
specific issues with each one of these and I won't bother to go into a lot of
detail, but suffice to say that all of these technologies are poor first
attempts at using a computer usefully, for people and organizations.
I think Gelernter is right on the money. I wrote about what a poor
tool email is for most uses in a previous
post. Essentially, the argument is that email as a means of collaboration
within an organization, or between an organization and its
customer/prospects/members/citizens, fails entirely.
When one or both halves of the private email conversation leaves the
organization, the inbox goes black and all of the knowledge equity contained in
the inbox is lost forever. Organizations are actually losing their own memories
to email's 'black inbox'.
For things like "Don't forget that there's a meeting at 3:00 today,"
email is great. But to discuss the agenda of a meeting, or go over decisions and
ideas that came up, email falls down. It's the electronic equivalent of two
cans and a string, when it comes to important communications and
collaboration.
Likewise, Instant Messaging, is another useless tool when it comes to
important communications. It's great for teenagers who treat it like passing
notes in class. But again it is an immature technology, not in the sense that IM
itself needs to grow up, but that it represents an immature electronic
communications field. Our software needs to grow up.
Ok, so I have once again described the problem, but what's the
answer? Well, a few other observations first. Why did we adopt email and, to a
lesser extent, IM so quickly? Well, they are both fairly easy to use. That's
true. And like all new technologies, when they start to move into the mainstream
we really don't have an option. It is also convenient, and quick. But I think
one of the other things people like is that both email and IM offer privacy to
those conversing. I am the sole author of my emails and I receive emails,
normally, that another author decides to send to me. Everything else is spam.
Any new technology that we bring to the market must execute
with these values: Easy to use, quick, convenient, private. It should not
be accessible to spam. The Organization must resolve to make the tool
mainstream. The next generation of electronic communications must be around
the things in our organization that are important. In other words, it must be
interoperable. So if we are communicating with or about clients then it must be
part of our CRM system. If we solve network problems for clients then it is
not enough to send emails to the client, receive emails from the client and
email our colleagues about the client. All of these communications need to be
bound to the client's record to create value - knowledge - about the
client.
Email is probably not going to go away any time soon. It has its
uses. I like hearing from Amazon that they have received my order. But for real
collaboration we need better tools. And I think that they're coming. | 
