This is from Ric Roberts of Swirrl, a company that offers a hosted online workspace for sharing knowledge. The Swirrl Blog is a good source of information on business collaboration and knowledge management. – Stewart

Email works great for short messages intended for one person, where you just want to alert the recipient to something, and no further discussion is required. But when you start to include more people, and they all start chipping in with their responses, email starts to break down as an efficient medium.

Say there are five other people in your team, and you want to get their feedback on a report that you intend to send to a client. If you send out an email to all of them, asking for their advice, you might get 3 or 4 responses back: some with revised versions of the report, some with notes at the end and some with comments interspersed within your original text. A couple of people might have ‘CC’d everyone else in your team when they replied, where others might have just replied directly to you.

I’m sure you can see where this is leading. Your team ends up with multiple conflicting versions of the report, some of which aren’t available to everyone involved. Holding a meaningful discussion over the content quickly becomes impossible.

What’s more, some of your team might be busy doing something else more urgent, and as your group email discussion progresses, you’re just annoying them with unnecessary interruptions. Conversely, because not everyone included the whole team in their replies, some people miss out on messages which may have sparked an idea or perhaps included topics where they could have contributed useful insights.

Using tools which provide you with central hub for communication (such as a wiki), instead of directly contacting each individual person, allows you to reduce the number of connections involved. This, in turn, reduces the number of interruptions and the number versions of the document that are generated, making the discussion much more manageable.  Furthermore, if the article is in a wiki, then it becomes search-able by all the users of the wiki too, so other people can find it again in the future.  This is not the case if it’s stuck in someone’s inbox.

Email is not entirely redundant: it still makes sense to send out an email to your team-mates, pointing them to the discussion in your chosen collaboration tool (e.g. a url to a wiki page). But from that point on, it’s more efficient to hold the discussion entirely within an application designed for that purpose. At Swirrl, we try to avoid sending each other emails as much as possible, and when we do, it’s often just to point out something we’ve written on our wiki.