The case for collaboration software over email

The St. Edmonds Lab at NetX blog has a nice plug for OpenTeams, but what's great about the post is their creative articulation of the need for collaborative software instead of email (specifically in the context of a creative ad agency). This graphic hilariously makes the point:


Here's a scary statistic:

Research shows that staff source between 50%-75% of information relevant to their work from other people. It also shows that more than 80% of an organisation’s digitised information resides on individual hard drives and inside personal files. This means that individuals - rather than the organisation - control the bulk of essential knowledge within an agency.

And a very pointed conclusion:

The need for better knowledge management in creative processes is evident. Campaigns are becoming more and more sophisticated to succeed in a fragmented media environment. If agencies don’t learn from mistakes and successes, they can never be better than their current workforce allows them to be. And since any key person leaves an organization at some point, they take with them a wide spectrum of extremely valuable knowledge, including industry and target group insights, confidential data and relationships. If the agency’s creative knowledge then only consists of static files on servers, a bunch of emails and the rented brains of the current employees, it isn’t much more than a name with a reputation, a building and a fancy coffee machine.