Posts Tagged ‘productivity’
Business - Written Monday, October 27, 2008 by Naumi Haque - 6 Comments
The Problem with Knowledge Work Part I: It’s not e-mail
E-mail, as much as we love to hate it, is not the problem.
There’s an assumption among Web 2.0 evangelists and mass collaborationists that the real problem with knowledge work is e-mail (e.g. see our own blog here and here). I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that e-mail is more a symptom, not a root cause. It’s often said that the challenges associated with enterprise collaboration are 90% cultural and only 10% technology-related. Is e-mail really the problem, or is it the nature of work? Giving up e-mail sounds fine and good, but it doesn’t remove the number of discrete tasks you have to complete. The real problem is the workflow model for enterprise collaboration.

Coming soon in paperback! Help rename the paperback version of Macrowikinomics and win a one-hour webinar for you and your colleagues with Don Tapscott. Ends 5:00pm ET, August 31.