Email is not a workflow

In 1971, an engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers on a network. He picked the @ sign to separate the person from the machine. Asked later what that historic first email said, he admitted he had no idea. Probably QWERTYUIOP.

More than fifty years on, that same invention is how most organizations approve purchases, assign work, store documents, record decisions, and onboard new employees.

Email was built to send a note. We've made it the operating system of the office.

What email is bad at

• Tracking. A request sitting in an inbox has no status, no deadline, and exactly one person who knows it exists. If that person is on vacation, so is the work.
• Visibility. Decisions get buried forty replies deep, next to an attachment named "v7_final_FINAL."
• Security. Email was designed without it, which is why a convincing fake message remains one of the most common ways attackers get in.
• Compliance. Reconstructing who approved what, and when, from a pile of threads is slow and error-prone.

The right tool for each job

The answer isn't to abolish email. It's to stop asking it to do everything.

• Requests and approvals belong in a workflow system, where they can be tracked, measured, and automated.
• Quick coordination belongs in team messaging.
• Documents belong in a shared workspace, where there is one version.
• Email keeps the job it's good at: messages to people outside your organization, and anything formal.

Governments are moving this way too. France built Tchap, a secure messaging platform for its public officials, and India launched Sandes for the same purpose.

Don't trade one mess for another

A warning from those who went first: chat can become a worse inbox. Forty channels and a constant stream of notifications is not progress.

And the rules follow you. Records retention and security requirements apply to every tool, so choose deliberately, or you'll be managing sprawl instead of email.

Start with one process

Don't announce the end of email. Nobody will believe you, and they'll be right.

Pick the one process that suffers most from living in inboxes. Access requests and new hire onboarding are common culprits. Move it to a proper workflow, measure how long it takes before and after, and then pick the next one.

That's continuous transformation in miniature.

Ray Tomlinson's invention is still very good at what it was built for. Let it go back to doing that.

An earlier version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn. Join the discussion there.