Communications Overload?

Communications overload

Communications overload has gotten to be a more-frequent topic in the last decade, as the types of channels and variety of tools has exploded. That has lead to some thinking on the part of enterprises, for example, about how to limit and manage communications overhead.

Recently, French IT service provider ATOS Origin announced its intention to be e-mail free for communication between employees in three years. CEO Thierry Breton cited the move as a response to the data explosion that has managers spending five to 20 hours a week attending to e-mail and 25 percent of time at work searching browsers and social network sites.

A part of their solution is to replacee-mail with more efficient social community platforms that bracket communications and assemble information by communities of interest. Another? Restrict non-work browsing. Should You Dump E-mail?

Some of us probably are skeptical that anything other than "unplugging" or "ignoring" messages will work. The whole movement of communications in recent years has been towards "ubiquity" in terms of ability to reach people anytime, anywhere, using a variety of modes including social networks, instant messaging, blogs, text messages, voice, email, tweets, video messages and more unified communications software.

Mobile communications, which according to some studies already is the preferred mode of voice communications, and rapidly becoming the main messaging platform and Internet access portal as well, is a key contributor.

Device	More this year	More next year
Mobile	33.6%	39.1%
E-mail	38.4%	34.2%
Texting (SMS)	30.7%	32.2%
Social networks	26.5%	26.2%
Desktop video	12.8%	26%
Instant messaging	18.6%	21.3%
VoiP calling	12.1%	21.3%

Source: Skype (December 2010)