Major risk #1 in enterprise collaboration: letting email "manage" collaboration
Do a little experiment on occasion: walk freely on a flat area, without any obstacles, without any risks on the horizon (a green space, a beach, a sports field)... then close your eyes. Try to keep walking in a safe direction without opening your eyes. And count. You will be surprised to see that when you reach 10-15-20 steps, you will want to open your eyes.... or stop.
Now do the same thing with your favorite email tool. Close it, continue working freely and count how many hours (or minutes) you can do without it. Usually, you won't last half a day. However, except for a few rare cases, the world will not end if you do not answer your correspondents within an hour (or even a minute).
This is the disaster that email has caused in its use in companies; more than a work tool (which is very simple and practical), it is a "hard drug" for each employee that is difficult to fight.
Messaging has become the perfect "killer app" for over 20 years!
It saturates employees with messages that are not always relevant and it cannibalizes their time (some employees spend more than 30% of their time reading and writing messages; do the experiment on your side and measure...). Your time is precious, yet many of these messages were not (really) worth reading or writing.
It leads to permanent "zapping", which is not conducive to concentration and exchange. Yet the majority of "knowledge workers" (to use Peter DRUCKER's expression) create value for the company in a state of concentration on a given subject at a given time. E-mail usually prevents them from reaching this level of concentration, from creating knowledge and from making complex high-level decisions.
It serves as a welcome screen, an agenda, the red thread of the day for employees. However, employees need to establish their own action plan to be efficient and prioritize the really urgent/important subjects in their agenda. Messaging constantly distracts them from this (accentuating the procrastination effect on complex but essential subjects requiring a real effort over time).
An asynchronous tool that is poorly used
It is used as a synchronous (real-time) tool when it is an asynchronous (delayed) tool. Add to that visual (pop-up) or worse, audible (welcome to the carnival) notifications and you are totally in control of your email. Imagine spending all day next to your mailbox to see if the mailman has come or will come; that's exactly what we do with e-mail...
Messaging is not focused on sharing or securing information (it is a kind of fax machine!). It leads to the dissemination of information and the absence of knowledge capitalization. Messaging is not made to manage information but to send and receive it. It is a bit like confusing a mailbox with a library. Personal and non-shared archive systems are just a stopgap. It is a profound error to consider email archives as personal information: they are the work elements associated with the person's function that must be shared and capitalized by the company. How much useful information is lost during a migration, a hard drive crash or an employee's departure?
Messaging has become over time a real problem for enterprise collaboration...
But of all the flaws exposed above, the most serious is that messaging prevents the emergence of other tools and good collaborative practices.
By saturating the useful time of employees, by giving them the illusion that they "manage" information and relationships with a fax, messaging prevents the company from progressing towards a collaboration that it deeply needs.
