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.

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