Atos, a leading international IT services company is planning to ban internal email. Having conducted detailed research amongst their 80,000 international employees, they found that on average they were each receiving an average of 100+ emails per day.
Of these 15% were useful, but the other 85% were read anyway because people were afraid they would miss something! People are spending an average of 15-20 hours a week checking and answering internal emails, which represents a huge loss of potential productive time.
In place of internal email Atos are using new tools such as the cloud computing environment, social networks, instant messaging, micro blogging, document sharing, and knowledge communities. Atos intend to have completely eliminated internal email by 2014. For more on this story please see BBC website.
