CEO bans email, encourages social networking
Who needs email when you have text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and a menagerie of alternative communication tools? Not Atos, a French IT firm that's planning to give email the boot. Over the course of the next eighteen months, CEO Thierry Breton hopes to ween 80,000 employees off of the old standby, pushing text messages, phone calls and face-to-face chats as alternatives. Breton strives to promote a collaborative social network similar to Facebook or Twitter to fill email's void and suffice as an easily accessible global network. Having himself been email sober at work for three years, Breton claims email is inefficient, and a burden to the workflow. Will this new social environment promote efficiency, or will pet photos and status updates become the new spam? If employees can't keep their social inclinations under wraps, Atos may have to resort to the Medieval carrier pigeon. Delivery estimates for long distance range from five days to never.
