Luis Suarez and Jon Mell recently discussed reducing email use at work and moving conversations, knowledge exchange, and collaboration to wikis, instant messaging, and other social tools.

The podcast is about 35 minutes, and an excellent listen!

Here are the questions they cover:

1. What has the reaction been from colleagues and friends in the industry?
2. Has anyone got frustrated / annoyed (said “why can’t you just send me an email?”)
3. How much time do you spend using social media tools?
4. Given you mostly use IBM’s internal tools, how do you communicate with customers / colleagues outside of IBM?
5. Do you think it’s possible for a 100% customer facing individual (eg. a brand sales rep) to reduce email so drastically as well?
6. Have you gained any net time? Is there value in using these tools even if you haven’t?
7. Aside from time-saving have you gained any insight / learned new things from interacting with social tools that would not have been possible by email?

Podcast: Escaping from email in the corporate world. (mp3 audio file)