Richard Craig – EngD Systems Thinking in Cyberdefence

Many companies utilise live internal chat applications such as Office Communicator, to reduce the number of emails sent internally. While I am quite happy to use it to fire off quick questions to people, most people simply use it as a quick guide to see if someone is in a meeting before giving them a call (as the Communicator links into Outlook calendar).

While I am happy to wait for a response that might come within a few hours, most come within a few minutes thanks to the social conditioning of existing real time chat applications. Those happy to communicate via chat will treat messages as urgently as if they were on the phone with the person. I am happy to know that I’m not filling up their email box with short questions and messages, that they have to waste time deleting.

During a conversation about “How the next generation of employees will work“, I had to admit that this generation should get up to speed and get to grips with Twitter (@SystemsFunking and @Cyberdefence . In the dynamic interweb 2.0 of social media and networking, email has started to feel as slow (and out dated!) as regular old, physical snail mail. There is a significant reduction in the amount of information available to employees who rely on email and standard information sources. Users can find out what is happening around the globe, but not what Sales team or Jim in the other building is up to. What is Sarah, who mostly hot desks between London and local offices currently working on?

Twitter is the bridge between real time chat and more static forms of communication such as email or forum messages. Blogs and webpages provide the delivery of static essays, forum and direct Personal Messages (PM) such as email deliver shorter content to the reader. Live chat provides instant content and situational awareness, but limited to the active participants. Twitter provides the ability to chat and update a status in real time, with the message history searchable at a later date to allow others to review and comment.

Visualise how email has enabled employees from different departments, offices and countries to quickly communicate and share ideas/resources, then imagine the same occuring a hundred times as fast!

The phone call was replaced as the main long distance form of internal company communication by email and I can see some form of Twitter replacing email. Based on the secure company network, tweets (larger than 140 chars?) could provide personal updates on tasks and projects to line managers and working groups using hash tags ( #myproject or #systemsthinking). There will always be a place for email, but I can see a place for a more connected real time corporate messaging network – even if only to reduce the amount emails!