Communication Revolution

In my opinion email will hang about for a while to come. The introduction of Office 365 Group 'conversations' in Outlook (and also the O365 Groups app) is I think an interesting way to help email-addicted users transition from one-to-one emails to Yammer-like group conversations, with the added bonus of having documents related to the group also appearing in the same (Outlook) application.

People will, however, still cling to email based communication for a while to come, especially in one-to-one settings where the content requires or lends itself more to a document-like structure rather than a short-chat type structure (like Twitter, Whatsapp etc).

The loss of documentary-based communication (whether in paper or electronic) is causing concern for the records management community, which worries about keeping and being able to access evidence of business activities and transactions in some form of context. This is not helped by leaders who communicate via instant messages (including inaccessible encrypted messages) or tweets.

My prediction is that email will live on quite strongly for another 15 years, by which time alternative communication methods will have become the norm, just as digital supplanted paper (well, for many people, although paper still has a strong following).