Really less Email in 2014? Doesn’t feel like it – Waiting for IBM Verse

Beyond the problem description I couldn’t agree more on, the statement that 2014 less emails have been sent, surprised me. Doesn’t feel like it. Good posting reflecting the challenges we have, but we need to take into consideration, that business email even makes it more complex adding requirements like email archiving and compliance, file sharing, management and security, secure support of mobile devices and many more aspects to the list of requirements. The upcoming release of IBM Verse – we are all desperately waiting to get access – will be an interesting checkpoint, knowing that features will be added in „continuous delivery mode“. Nevertheless I would love to get started, complain that not every feature is available in a first release, but seeing improvements months after months!

The email address as we know it was born when Ray Tomlinson introduced the “@” sign in 1977, since which email has continually grown in popularity as a communication tool for work and pleasure — until last year. For the first time ever, 2014 recorded a sharp decrease in the number of emails sent around the world, from 204m per second in 2013 to 138.8m per second in 2014.

For personal or social exchanges, instead we’re increasingly using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and others. But the office email inbox is as busy as ever — and this is a real problem for the millions of workers who have become so dependent upon it.

Email overload is suffered by 87% of employees, with 53% of them saying they cannot cope with the volume of email they have to deal with. So there’s a real need to re-imagine the antiquated applications and approaches to email that are hindering productivity and causing an increase in stress at work. …

Verse brings fast search to mail — and its social element promotes relationship-building with colleagues by offering information and insight into others involved in any given email correspondence. This feature will help organisations to determine who knows what and who’s talking to whom — and will reduce the duplication of work and the time taken to locate important information. So this goes some way to addressing the problem of email management.

via Four Email Problems That Technology Can’t Solve Yet | Lifehacker Australia.