Utility seeks to delete email

British Energy is to test online collaboration technology that could replace a significant proportion of the organisation’s email activities.

The company, which operates nine nuclear and coal-fired power stations in the UK, will start piloting collaboration systems later this month to find an alternative for email, which is becoming increasingly inefficient.

Ian Campbell, British Energy’s IT director, says in the past email has been a great help to the firm’s communications, but that is no longer the case.

‘It is getting to the stage where we have to ask if email is dictating our lives, and we need to ask how collaboration can let us get away from that,’ he told Computing. ‘I would love for all of us at British Energy to become less dependent on email.’

The ability to copy messages to numerous parties is among the worst problems the technology causes for British Energy, says Campbell.

‘It is a mechanism that allows people to say: “Well, I copied you in, you should know what is going on”,’ he said. ‘Email makes it easier to make demands on people, but that is not the same as being effective, and I think that collaboration is one step towards that,’ he added.

‘For our architects, it would mean the difference between information being forced onto them and deciding when they want to look at that.’

Gartner analyst Nikos Drakos says email has become a victim of its own success.

‘It has become the default universal collaboration system, because it is flexible, efficient and peer-to-peer-based. But it has very little structure and it is difficult to find things on an ongoing basis,’ he said.

Drakos says other collaboration systems have their own disadvantages, which IT managers should take into account.

‘When a group moves out of email into another collaboration system, they have to change context, and unless you can bring in the information from email that led to the move to the new system, it is not so useful,’ he said.

British Energy is examining collaboration systems as part of a wider systems overhaul, including extensive modifications to power stations and the updating of business trade technology.

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