Stop Email Overload and Break Silos Using Wikis, Blogs, and IM

Email is the central nervous system of most modern organizations, from startups to large corporations. Every communication, from the most important (planning for the big client meeting tomorrow) to the most trivial (fresh donuts in the kitchen) takes place through the corporate email system. The results: email overload and lowered productivity for the entire organization. Employees are tethered to their email via Blackberries even over the weekend, leading to communications burnout.

The biggest single reason for this is the inherent nature of email itself: it is a point-to-point communication medium. The sender has to decide both the content of the message as well as who the recipients are. If the recipient list is too large, it contributes to email overload. If it is too small, that could lead to communication gaps and "informational silos" in the organization, where one group in the company doesn't really know what the other group is doing. Another problem is that each email message is a single unit, making it hard to track conversations among multiple parties. Many email readers thread conversations, but that is done at a syntactic rather than semantic level. Finally, putting everything in email makes it difficult to build institutional memory.

We hit the email wall at my company Kosmix recently. When we were less than 30 people, managing by email worked reasonably well. The team was small enough that everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Frequent hallway conversations reinforced relationships. However, once we crossed the 30-person mark, we noticed problems creeping in. We started hearing complaints of email overload and too many meetings. And despite the email overload and too many meetings, people still felt that there was a communication problem and a lack of visibility across teams and projects. We were straining the limits of email as the sole communications mechanism.

We knew something had to be done. But what? Sri Subramaniam, our head of engineering, proposed a bold restructuring of our internal communications. He led an effort that resulted in us relying less on email and more on wikis, blogs, and instant messaging. Here's how we use these technologies everyday in running our business.

Blogs for Status Reports

Each employee and each project has a dedicated blog. People can post as often as they wish to their personal or project blog, but they are required to post at least one weekly status update. All blogs are visible to everyone in the company. Anyone can subscribe to the feed for any particular team or individual blog. So for example, Josh in engineering can follow the blog of Mike in sales, if he's curious what Mike is up to. This results in complete 360 degree visibility throughout the organization. People can also post comments on these blogs. Someone might post a problem they are facing, and others can post comments providing suggestions. This results in automatic grouping of conversations based on topics of interest.

The biggest advantage of the blog approach is that it is a publish-subscribe mechanism. I don't need to decide who to direct my communication to;  I just post on my blog. Anyone in the company who is interested in what I'm doing can subscribe to my blog to be notified of updates. And if someone just has a passing interest, they can always read my blog periodically without subscribing to it. This approach also breaks silos, for example, between engineering and marketing, or between marketing and sales. Sometimes the best product ideas come from sales people. And sometimes the best sales ideas come from engineers.

No one is required to read any particular blog, with two exceptions:

1. Managers are expected to read the status updates of their team members and post feedback.
2. People working on a project are expected to read each other's blogs.

The blog approach has reduced email overload at Kosmix and even reduced the number of time-consuming "status update" meetings.  Most important, the blog serves as an institutional memory -- an electronic record of our business. Conversations do not get lost in the ether but are recorded and can be searched at any time in the future by new people on a project or new company employees.

The Wiki for Persistent Information

While blogs are great for status updates and discussions around ideas, they are not the best place to put items that serve as reference material: for example, documentation, specs, reports, and so on. The problem is that blogs are in reverse chronological order, and each blog can have just one author, preventing collaborative editing. For these situations, we use a wiki. The internal corporate wiki has sections corresponding to each project and each functional group in the company. Documentation, specs, and reports go into the wiki.

The other critical section on the wiki is the Team section. Every employee has a homepage on the wiki, with a recent photo, describing their responsibilities at work and interests outside of work. As the team grows, and you see a new face at the office, this is a quick way of finding out who that person is.

Instant Messaging for Spontaneous Discussions

As Kosmix has grown, we now have people working from more than one physical location. In addition, we promote a culture of people working from home whenever it is compatible with their job responsibilities. Thus, we need a substitute for the face-to-face hallway conversations that cannot happen because someone is working from home or from another location. Email is not the best option because it is asynchronous and thus loses the spontaneity of a hallway chat.

Instant messaging fills this need very well indeed. The entire Kosmix team is on IM. Each team member is required to set the "status" message on their IM client during normal sane working hours to indicate where they are working from. They can also post a "Do not disturb" message to indicate that they don't welcome interruptions at the moment. Instant messaging leads to quick resolution of many issues without spawning interminable email threads.

If I needed to have everyone in the company on my IM buddy list, that would be a very long buddy list indeed. To avoid this problem, every team member's IM handle and status are displayed on their wiki homepage. You can initiate an IM session with anyone from their wiki homepage.

Convention over Configuration

The effects of the communication restructuring have been immediate and very visible. They include a lot less email and almost none on weekends; better communication among people; and 360 degree visibility for every member of the Kosmix team. After we instituted these changes, everyone on the team feels more productive, more knowledgeable about the company, has more spare time to spend on things outside of work.

Kosmix is certainly not the first company to use internal blogs, wikis, and IM for corporate communication. Google has been using blogs for status reports for a while now. The big difference is the conventions we have established about we use these tools. For example, one of the common complaints I've heard about Google's use of internal blogs is that most employees feel no one reads their blog. I've heard of one case where an employee for several weeks posted a status report that read: "Is anyone reading this?" By establishing conventions around expected read-write patterns, we have avoided this problem so far at Kosmix.

No doubt as Kosmix grows further, even this model will break down at some point and we will have to look for new communication models. I'll post an update when that happens! In the meantime, please do share your experiences of innovative corporate communication practices.

Implementation Notes

We use twiki for our wiki and blog software at Kosmix. The wiki functionality in twiki is great, but it took quite a bit of customization work from our indefatigable Sri Subramaniam to make it work well as a blogging platform too. We are planning to release our twiki tweaks as open source in the next couple of months, once we have a chance to package them neatly.

Another great option for blogs is WordPress, which allows you to host blogs internal to your company. We went with twiki because of the integrated wiki/blogging solution.

We have standardized on Yahoo! Instant Messenger for instant messaging. However, the other IM products such as MSN Instant Messenger and Google Talk have comparable functionality. I would suggest you pick the one most people in your company already use for personal communication.

Comments

[Abhinav]

Agree with most of them.
Some points:
1. I would probably impose a taxonomy and discipline when creating blogs and wikis. Without a taxonomy it becomes a burden on people to discover new blogs as a company's size grows and more and more groups start to publish blogs or wikis.
2. The second would be to introduce just a little bit of 'friction' into the process of creating blogs and wikis and instill some discipline into the process lest these proliferate like rabbits. While it should be left to the discretion and judgment of people wanting to start groups, there should be some formal or informal understanding as to when a new blog/wiki is needed vs. when using an existing one should suffice.
3. The third is housekeeping: to retire blogs that are no longer needed. Too often blogs start out with a lot of enthusiasm, but then meander into neglect due to various reasons.
rgds,
Abhinav

[eric norlin]

anand-

tks for the great post. i've been thinking a lot about this issue lately, as i've been working on a session for this at Defrag (www.defragcon.com):

http://defragcon.com/Blog/?p=244

ejn

[Ian Gardner]

Really interesting post - thanks.

Two questions:

Do you make any use of VOIP and/or telephones or do you expect everyone to use IM?

Are IM communications recorded and available to others at all? I could see that as being the next step towards totally breaking the silos and opening up all information.

[Mohan Gummalam]

One thing that has worked in my new company is IRC. Although at the face of it IRC conjures up the images of really old technology (like gopher, etc), I find it to be a very effective tool. As a new employee, with IRC, I find it extremely easy to 'sit' in a conversation or be a 'fly-in-the-wall' - and absorb as much as I can. Plus, the benefit is that one can join any channel, and thus be up-to-date with the happenings within the company. Also its best for posing questions, not directed at anyone in particular, like: "Does anyone in appdev know why this page is rendering so wierdly?". Kosmix should adopt IRC (to supplement IM). IMs are great for direct person-to-person communication, but IRCs are best for conducting an electronic 'hallway conversation'. As an added benefit, you get help from people with whom you might not have interacted with otherwise. For a growing company, what better way to increase camaraderie?

[sak2109]

i have observed the utility of these tools in our research group. I think any number above 2 means people shud switch to these tools instead of emails.

We have moved a lot of the documentation, meeting minutes etc to wiki (twiki in our case too). Email is just not the tool for work updates, documentation sharing etc. That technology has been much abused. And the constant flow of emails leads to an interrupt driven workflow - numerous studies that i have done observing workflow in healthcare settings, clearly demonstrate that an interruption causes inefficiencies.

The point that putting information on wiki/blogs by its very act leads to documentation is an important one. By doing this we have greatly reduced the amount of time briefing a new member to the research team or by bombarding them with tons of word documents to catch up.

I am actually beginning to experiment with using twitter for updates instead of blogs.

I must add that it has taken an enormous amount to move people to use wiki for documentation - even now they are stuck to word documents, which necessitate several back and forth when versions change. Its a battle that is still on.

One more point - if even one member (and if that happens to be a senior member of the team) doesnt use the Wiki/Blog, then the whole thing can become counter productive - the same has to be documented in word and stored along with the wiki. So to make this successful you need for leadership commitment

[Scott Frey]

Have you considered or use anything like Meebo or Simkl to handle your IM conversations? Simkl just keeps a running history of IM conversations and easily allows sharing of the entire conversation. Meebo has widgets that can be embedded within web pages, and also keeps records of conversations. You could attach the conversation streams to running projects or anything else.

[Scott Frey]

Second Idea....Google talk also saves conversations, and you could set up filters with "chat with" in the subject line to automatically forward conversations wherever.

[Colin Crook]

Great post Anand! We've been tackling this issue at our communications firm. Not just internally, but all clients want to use email too of course. I'm starting to use RescueTime to analyze/track the time spent on these kinds of issues. Pretty interesting and I think it's a good place to start the research. More on those guys here if you or anyone else is interested. http://www.rescuetime.com/

[Richa]

Hi,

I am Richa from SiliconIndia. I am also an avid blogger for a while now and participating actively in Indian blogosphere. I read your blog posting and found them very interesting and informative. We would love to see a copy of your blogs posted here, whenever you are posting it on blogger.com. Here are some of the benefits of posting your blogs here:

We have a strong community of 500,000 Indian professionals
Best blogs of 2008 to be published in a book "SiliconIndia bLoG PrinT"
Best blog to be printed in SliconIndia & SmartTechie magazines each month
Chance to be featured on homepage everyday

We appreciate your community initiative here and in helping build a more powerful India! Also, if you have any ideas or want to volunteer to help for SiliconIndia, we would be more than excited to get your help. Pls mail me back at richa@siliconindia.com with your suggestions and feedback.

Richa
Blog Editor – SiliconIndia

[Ian Wild]

We came to the same conclusion about 7 or 8 years ago at Plusnet (A UK based Broadband Service Proivder) when we were not much bigger. We now have 240 employees in the UK and more in India, Poland and South Africa all of whom are empowered by other tools not to use email.

I really like the internal blog structure you've created, as that sounds more effective at communicating updates than the internal web forum software we use to do the same.

Our best tools for communication has proved to be our in house web based task management system. This is a simple web interface which performs some project management functions and lets people have ownership of projects, jobs and tasks, which are assigned to individuals who then close their item when the work is completed. This provides accountability, reporting, project planning, delegation etc etc. It's really very useful.

What makes this tool even better is that it is integrated with out meeting management system, which is used to book rooms, invite people to meetings, populate calendars, document and publish minutes to everyone and and most importantly collect actions for named owners that are documented and agreed during the meeting. These actions appear as tasks and the status of the task s can be monitored in any follow-up meetings.

Anyway, thanks for hopefully providing us with some ideas we can use to improve our internal comms...

Ian

PS - We use our own jabber server for IM. Jabber is pretty good as people can choose their own preferred client and the open nature of the protocol means it's easy to populate chat logs automatically into other systems, and they can be stored locally.

[Mark Berthelemy]

Hi Anand,

Really clear explanation - thanks. I'm going to use it within my company to see if we can reduce our reliance on email a bit...

Have you looked at b2evolution (www.b2evolution.net) for blogging. It provides a multi-user, multi-blog platform in a much simpler (but sophisticated) way than Wordpress MU. You can impose a taxonomy on posts, which means you can subscribe only to particular categories of post. It's also got in-built workflow if you've got more than one author per blog.

[Tommie Jones]

Good post and a lot of good points. However...
The advantage to email is that it is a known quantity to non techs and it is easier to generate content. The conversation style with responding and asking questions seems to pull data out. Maybe a system that leverages email and blogs would be sensible. If someone has an email that they think is worth publishing then forwarding the message to their blog might be a good solution.
This would also handle one of my big issues with email. When a person leaves the company his personal knowledge base (email) is often never looked at again. We need to make public their knowledge bases.

We also need to break away from storing content on network drives and personal laptops. I consider Microsoft a hinderance these days. People tend to create documents that no one will ever read because they drop it on a shared drive as opposed to putting it on a wiki or the like. Maybe google apps should come out with a internal appliance that people can use to create documents and finally get rid of microsoft office.

[Michael]

Anand, if you're going to update old blog posts so they pop up in my RSS feed again, could you structure the update so I can tell what changed?

[Anand Rajaraman]

Michael, good point. I didn't know that updating blog posts causes them to pop up again on some RSS readers -- doesn't happen on mine. But now that I know it does, I'll minimize changes and make them apparent when I do.

[Michael]

It seems that new comments also bring this blog's posts to the top of my RSS feed. Is that the fault of my RSS reader, or of the blog software?

[Nimit Kumar]

I cannot agree more. Frequent and redundant emails not only distract, it also creates the 'needle in a hay-stack' phenomena.

I have particularly been amazed by the usefulness of wikis for managing intranet information. Wikis and internal blogs are great ways to maintain publicly editable information. They persist and can evolve as problems at different levels keep getting cracked. We used a wiki in one of my older jobs for collaboration between two remotely located teams. It also helped ease the management's nightmare of tracking progress of the remote teams. I have used mediawiki and it works great for me.

I have noticed very limited adoption of wikis owing to strong allegiance by folks to emails and email-based tools. The fact that several (not so tech-savvy) souls are driven by Microsoft Word, it is a tougher nut to crack.

It particularly makes sense for startups to manage their fast evolving information and ideas as wiki pages. Easy to manage and quick to update, on a shoe-string budget.