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The dilemma surrounding separation of work and personal email rages on- with no clear winner as to what people should do: completely separate or mix?

Last December, the Information Commissioners Office offered new guidance for information held in private email accounts concerning official business is subject to Freedom of Information requests.  So Public Officials, watch out!  You can’t use private emails to talk about official business without being discovered.

But this news didn’t surprise us considering the Generation Gmail research we conducted last year. The prevailing behaviour was shown in our research: 79% of people had used their personal email for work purposes. Since companies have no control over personal email this can lead to a complete compliance nightmare.

For most of us not in public service, however, this brings up the much broader question: should organisations encourage the use of work email for personal use, or tolerate personal email for business use?

We live in a rapidly changing landscape, the IT world has significantly transformed over the last 12 months with the consumerisation of IT, Social Networks, Mobile and Cloud. It’s clearly not business as usual anymore.

Generation Gmail discovered that people felt their corporate email wasn’t up to the job.  With limits of mailbox sizes, remote and mobile access sometimes lacking, they felt forced to use personal devices and accounts in order to remain productive.

This isn’t surprising with 33% on Exchange 2003 and 53% on Exchange 2007. 

At the same time, we’ve seen the rise of Smartphones, so people are used to being always ‘on.’  I would go so far as to say they want to be available all the time. I for one, hate turning my ‘out of office’ on and almost never do it.

Once individuals are used to switching between email accounts, it is almost inevitable that corporate policies will fall by the wayside.  But perhaps rather than trying to control employee behavior through policy, organisations should instead be focusing on ensuring they have the right technology in place to ensure that the *right* and the *easiest* employee behaviour become the same thing?

IT organisations need to provide an email system that’s equivalent in features and functionality to employees’ personal email in order for them to choose by default it. So they can get the compliance and security benefits of corporate email.

And to empower that, employers need to be OK with employees using their work email for personal communication – employees shouldn’t need to make a decision about which account to use.

The benefits beyond compliance are interesting too.  Having employees looking at emails out of hours and when they’re on the move empowers lots more productivity. Compared to the potential loss during work time for high value workers, creating a more responsive, agile organisation.

At least for US politicians this is already enshrined in law, as Sarah Palin found out when her personal account was hacked.  But it’s also not much good if it’s allowed to be deleted…

If I were an IT manager or CIO, I would rather have most high value information workers were comfortable sending a personal email from a work account than visa-versa.

It’s time the business enabled the IT manager to be on a system that fulfils the demands of the users by eliminating the complexity that stops them migrating and upgrading.

Photo CC via CA Technologies on Flickr

Recently I had the pleasure of participating in a debate, on BusinessWeek.com, about the pros and cons of letting employees work from home. Those who know me will be unsurprised to hear that I argued the “pro” side of the debate. Having worked at home for most of the last 30 years, any other position would have been grotesquely hypocritical.

The debate was extremely space-limited, and as I edited down my remarks I found that I had reduced a very important point to a single passing reference: “Being open to physically handicapped or geographically isolated workers can improve the prospects for finding a highly qualified candidate.”

This comment only scratches the surface of the importance of Internet technology in empowering the handicapped to play a more full role in our society and our economy. Had I more space, I would have mentioned not just the benefit to the employer of being able to employ skilled but handicapped workers, and not just the obvious benefit to the handicapped themselves of being able to find more meaningful and satisfying work. I would have mentioned the benefit to all of us that comes from getting to know some amazing people who are otherwise invisible to us because of their handicaps.

Most of all, I would have mentioned John Ferguson.

In 1994, I was the co-founder of a company called First Virtual, a pioneering Internet payment system. During our salad days, our service was growing so fast that I calculated that, if it continued, everyone on the planet would be our customer in 16 months. Obviously that didn’t happen, but the growth posed a customer service challenge that we met well enough to get accolades from our customers. Much of the credit for that goes to John Ferguson.

We hired John as our first customer service representative, and he developed most of the templates, processes, texts, and procedures that served us well as we grew. Customers often told me how helpful and efficient he was, and how happy they were with him. But there was something about John that none of them even imagined.

John was a quadriplegic. Confined to a wheelchair, at best, for virtually his whole life, he did all his typing with his mouth. I’m not sure anyone has ever felt as liberated by his job as John did — even Stephen Hawking was 21 before he was first afflicted, but John had been fighting his disease since early childhood, and he’d had few chances to put his talents to productive use.

First Virtual gave him a chance to be truly useful and appreciated, and he thrived in that role, and in not being seen primarily as a handicapped person. In fact, even one of my friends and colleagues who worked with John very closely had absolutely no idea of his handicap for the first year or so they worked together. Internet technology didn’t just allow John to work from home; it allowed him to be as close as he could ever get to a “normal” — non-handicapped — person. He never wanted pity, and he clearly delighted in having his disability be, at least in this one context, utterly invisible to the world.

I believe that working with John enriched the lives of all of us who knew him at First Virtual. It was impossible to come to know him and not become more sensitive to the situation of the disabled, more aware not only of their difficulties but of their potential and their dignity. Handicap or no, John was simply a great customer service agent, and it made a big difference when you learned that fact before you learned anything of his handicap. Working with John changed me forever, making me aware that even sympathy and pity can be a form of discrimination.

Several years into his time at First Virtual, John died rather suddenly. I don’t think he expected a long life, and he certainly knew how limited the time he had would be, but he was determined to make as much as he possibly could of the life that was given him. I will always remember him as an inspiring example of how determination and technology can overcome even the most extreme handicap. And I will always be glad that we at First Virtual were daring enough to hire someone who worked from home not by choice, but out of necessity.

So that’s another argument for having people work from home, one that I couldn’t possibly do justice to in the space available in Business Week. If you go down the path of hiring remote employees, and you’re very lucky, you might meet someone like John Ferguson, and he might just change you for life.

In his January 4 op-ed piece, Vint Cerf argued that Internet access is not a human right. While I consider Vint a friend and have tremendous respect for his achievements, I think he’s wrong in this case. Perhaps out of modesty, the man often called the “father of the Internet” is undervaluing the global network he played such an important role in developing. I fear his underestimation may be as fundamental and consequential as his belief, 30 years ago, that 4 billion Internet addresses would be sufficient — another of the rare times I disagreed with him. I believe that in the future, the Internet will be nearly as fundmental to civilized human life as food, clothing, and shelter.

Vint centers his argument on the claim that “technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself.” This is patently incorrect. Among the most widely recognized human rights are clothing and shelter, which are among the most fundamental of human technologies. It is true that some rights are more abstract, but many are not. The US Bill of RIghts guarantees freedom of the press and the right to bear arms; technology is fundamental to both of those rights.

The UN Declaration of Human Rights goes further, in Article 19, asserting a fundmental human right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” It is no great stretch to say that Article 19 itself makes Internet access a basic human right. Article 27 declares a right “to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” Does anyone really believe this is possible, in the modern world, without access to the Internet?

More broadly, it is increasingly impossible to participate fully in the political life of a developed nation without Internet access. All rights related to such participation will, in the future, be meaningless without a right to access. In his modesty, perhaps, Vint fails to recognize the extent to which the Internet is transforming almost every aspect of society, certainly including the political and cultural spheres in which many of our hitherto-guaranteed rights will become meaningless without Internet access.

It might be argued that this just means that Internet access is necessary for, and implied by, some of our existing rights. The truth of that statement, however, in no way negates the fundmental importance of Internet access. The right to participate fully in society also implies a right to food and shelter, but that doesn’t mean we don’t view those things as basic rights themselves.

What’s hardest for us old Internet hands to accept is that the Internet hasn’t just been a success; it is changing the very nature of what it means to be human. Recent studies have already shown that the availability of the Internet changes the way we use our own memories — that is, it alters the very fabric of our thought, let alone our discussion and debate. Increasingly it will be impossible — and already is in many countries — to be a full participant in civil society without Internet access. If Internet access is a prerequisite to full participation in citizenship, it should certainly be viewed as a human right.

Vint, the Internet is more important than even you think!

Enough said. Because email isn’t going away in a hurry

Wishing you a Happy New Year!

Click here for Part One of my predictions, covering January through March

Click here for Part Two of my predictions, covering April through June

Click here for Part Three of my predictions, covering July through September

October

• Microsoft releases WinHealth Vista.  Designed to make healthcare more friendly, this version is quickly found to provide a beautiful user interface, and to time its crashes to cause maximum damage to patients’ health.  “You can’t have everything,” says CEO Ballmer.
• Atos announces the implementation of a voicemail-to-Jabber gateway.  Unfortunately, many Jabber clients break under the weight of large audio messages, so Atos announces a preferred Jabber client that its employees must use.    That software also supports email, but Atos disables all email-related features and begins developing Jabber-related features that do the same things.
• Feeling left out by Apple and Google’s settlement offers to the victims, the Eastern District Court of Texas sues Apple and Google for damages in the courthouse collapse.   “We’re going to need to rebuild, of course,” says a local judge.  “Besides, why shouldn’t we get a piece of this pie?”
• IBM announces a global expansion, hiring 35,000 new employees, nearly 3% of them in the US.  IBM stock skyrockets to 400.

November

• Microsoft releases WinHealth 7.   Designed primarily to undo the damage caused by Vista, WinHealth 7 is generally found to be stable and usable.  Unfortunately, by now most health care providers have converted to Apple’s iHealth platform.
• A rash of workplace heart attacks leads to a series of lawsuits against Microsoft for its Kinect 365 product.  A slimmed-down Steve Ballmer reluctantly announces the withdrawal of the product from the market.  However, he is later photographed gleefully destroying his own Kinect 365 by jumping up and down on it while stuffing himself with donuts.
• An employee of Atos in the US fails to receive an email notice of his child’s illness at school, and files a lawsuit against his employer.  Atos announces another upgrade to its Jabber/email gateway, this time to accept messages from any email address, not just those of its customers.  Atos employees immediately begin receiving Jabber messages from deposed Nigerian dictators.
• Atos also announces that it has lost 25% of its customers in the third quarter.  CEO Breton says this is unrelated to the ban on email.
• The few remaining independent patent litigation firms rush to go public.  Fish and Richardson overnight becomes the seventh most valuable company in the world.
• HP announces that it is discontinuing the Blackberry product line.  “None of this stuff is working out,” says Whitman.  “We’re pretty sure there’s no future in smartphones, and we’re just happy to be figuring that out while Apple and Google are still wasting all that money on it.”

December

• Microsoft announces that buyers of the now-discontinued Kinect 365 product are eligible for steep discounts on WinHealth 8, whatever that turns out to be.
• The Atos Board of Directors fires CEO Breton.  However, because they notify him by email, he shows up at work the next day, unaware.  He is promptly escorted out by security personnel, who turn out to have been using email all along.
• Apple and Google settle the lawsuits related to the courthouse collapse, paying the victims, survivors, and Eastern District Court a staggering total of $95B.  Apple, Google, Samsung, and HTC then announce a mutual settlement that withdraws all lawsuits between them, with no cash changing hands.  “Combined with our lawyers’ fees, we’ve now fulfilled our obligation to Steve Jobs’ memory by spending every penny of our cash reserves on this case,” says Tim Cook.  “I know Steve would have been proud.”
• IBM announces the construction of new campuses in India and China, to consolidate operations there and accomodate the influx of new hires.  In an unrelated development, IBM also consolidates operations at its home base in Westchester county, New York, where three of its sites will be closed. IBM stock rises to 450.  Her stock options make CEO Rometty the highest paid female executive in US history.

January 2013

• Mei Su, a college student in China, is allocated the world’s last remaining IPv4 address.  Still, most IT directors feel that converting to IPv6 is just too scary.  The Internet is now full.  ICANN announces that it will unilaterally seize any unused IPv4 addresses and sell them to the highest bidder.  When asked what gave ICANN the authority to do that, a board member replies, “Who’s gonna stop us?”
• Atos announces a next-generation email offering for its customers.  “No one understands the value of email better than Atos” says the new CEO, Peter Bauer, who is absorbing Atos into his larger company, Mimecast.

 All of us at Mimecast want to wish you a much happier new year than the one I’ve just described!

Click here for Part One of my predictions, covering January through March

Click here for Part Two of my predictions, covering April through June

July

• Microsoft releases WinHealth 2000.  This proves a popular upgrade to WinHealth NT, supporting modern medical equipment on a larger scale.  Confusingly, the product is released in 374 different editions, one for every major hospital in the US.
• Atos announces that it lost 20% of its customers in the first two quarters.  Recognizing that its customers are not ready to be as forward looking in abandoning email, the company announces an email to Jabber bidirectional gateway, so that its communications will look like email to customers but like Jabber on the inside.
• Tragedy strikes the sleepy town of Marshall, Texas, the country’s most favored patent venue, when the federal courthouse collapses under the weight of documents filed in the Apple patent litigation.  A judge, two marshalls, and three clerks are killed, while dozens of others are injured.  The survivors and the estates of the victims promptly file wrongful death suits against both Apple and Google.
• HP buys Research in Motion.  “RIM’s Blackberry is a perfect match for our portfolio of failed smartphone operating systems,” says CEO Whitman.  “It will coexist with Palm wonderfully.  We expect this to be our best acquisition since Palm.  Or Compaq.  Or maybe EDS.  Whatever.”
• Facebook goes public in the most successful IPO in US history.  Unfortunately, tragedy strikes when the weight of his cash causes Mark Zuckerberg’s home to be swallowed up by the Earth, taking half of Silicon Valley with it.  IBM immediately asks Congress for emergency aid, which it uses to fund a major expansion of its operations in Russia and Brazil.

August

• Microsoft releases WinHealth ME, playfull named for “Mayan End-Times,” in tribute to the alleged Mayan prediction that the world would end in 2012.  Unfortunately, the world actually does end for a disturbing number of patients.  After a large number of fatalities the product is withdrawn amidst a flurry of lawsuits and government investigations.
• Kinect 365 is officially released to wide acclaim, and quickly becomes a staple in many offices.  Health insurers begin to offer a “healthy working” discount to office workers who use it, and obese workers in particular begin to find themselves pressured to use it rather than their traditional keyboard and mouse.
• A reporter for CNET discovers that a simple LinkedIn search gives him access to a remarkable amount of internal Atos communication.  Atos announces that employees should only use Jabber from now on, noting that their extensions have managed to turn it into a tool that’s almost as useful as email.
• Eager to curry favor with the Marshall, Texas, authorities, Apple offers a $350M settlement package to the victims of the courthouse collapse.  Not to be outdone, Google offers a cool billion, and a bidding war ensues.
• IBM announces record profits, and its stock hits 300.

September

• Microsoft releases WinHealth XP — at last, a version of WinHealth that does everything its users want it to do.  A big hit, this version lasts longer in the market than any other, and Microsoft will struggle for years to give XP users a reason to upgrade.
• An Atos executive returns from vacation to find over 10000 Jabber messages, constituting over 300 scrambled threads.  Atos announces it will develop a threaded Jabber client to make asynchronous communication more efficient, like email.
• Apple sells some of its non-core assets to bolster its cash on hand to a whopping $300B.  “We’re willing to spend every penny on lawyers,” says CEO Cook.  “We know Steve would have wanted it this way.”
• HP announces it is killing PalmOS.  “Now that we have Blackberry, we don’t need Palm any more.  We, uh,  just figured that out,” says Whitman.
• In a shocking major announcement, CA (formerly Computer Associates) stuns the industry by announcing that it does, in fact, still exist.

Part Four of my predictions  may be found here.

Click here for Part One of my predictions, covering January through March

April

• Microsoft releases WinHealth NT.  This “industrial strength” release supports multiple patients, and works on the scale of a moderately large hospital.  Unfortunately, it is revealed that Microsoft lured Sanjay Gupta away from CNN to design it, and CNN promptly sues for damages.
• All Atos employees who were seeking jobs on LinkedIn are accidentally “outed” due to the company’s broader use of the system.  CEO Thierry Breton proclaims this to be a good thing, while Atos employees flock to other job sites.
• Google purchases two of the 10 top patent law firms in America.  They are generally perceived as having overpaid, but the lawyers say it’s the free food that closed the deal.
• When Congress passes the aptly-named “Pre-election Allocation of New Dollars for Enhancing Recovery” economic stimulus act, IBM is first in line at the trough.  “With these stimulus dollars,” says CEO Rometty, “we can create more jobs and ensure that great American companies like IBM continue to lead the world.”  IBM stock hits 250.

May

• Microsoft releases WinHealth 95.  Although it was preannounced as a system that would replace both WinHealth 3.1 and WinHealth NT, it is ultimately scaled back to be a toy that kids can play with to learn more about medicine.  Most kids find it too unreliable to be useful.
• Steve Ballmer demonstrates a pre-release version of Kinect 365, spelling out an office memo using his entire body.  “It’s just like the Village People spelling out YMCA,” he explains.   “The Village People have always been the inspiration for my speaking style on stage, and now I can use their techniques even to send email.”  After demonstrating one such email, Ballmer collapses into a nearby chair and calls for water.
• All Atos customers are told that they now need to use Linkedin, Twitter, or Jabber to contact the company.  This message is, of course, delivered by email.
• Google’s Eric Schmidt testifies before congress about the importance of training more patent attorneys in America.  Congress agrees, but ironically names the resulting law the “Jobs Memorial Jobs Bill.”
• HP kills WebOS.  “OK, now I’m sure, we meant Palm, not WebOS, sorry,”  says CEO Whitman.  The company also announces a record first quarter loss.   Chairman Ray Lane says he has “total faith in Carly.  I mean Meg.  Whatever, you know, the broad we hired last year.”

June

• Microsoft releases WinHealth 98.  A stable, usable successor to WinHealth 95, it sweeps through the elementary schools of America.
• A minor misspelling of a customer’s Twitter handle causes Atos to leak some of that customer’s proprietary information, leading to the loss of a major contract.  Atos announces that from now on, customers should contact the company using LinkedIn and Jabber only.
• Samsung, HTC, and Google announce a joint venture in which their patent portfolios are pooled to create what some call the world’s largest patent troll.  It files 73 countersuits against Apple in its first month.
• IBM announces a global restructuring, including 20,000 layoffs worldwide.  “This is strictly a business necessity,” says Rometty, “and is in no way related to the stimulus money.”  Nearly 1000 of the 20,000 layoffs take place outside the US.  IBM stock rises slightly, to 260.

Part Three of my predictions may be found here.

Disclaimer: Predicting the future is a black art. It is in fact conceivable that one or more of these predictions may not come true.

January

• Having said, in December, that health care reform requires a “Windows-like platform,” Microsoft pre-announces WinHealth 1.0, promising a demo “eventually.” Hospitals across America scramble to change their entire IT strategies.
• Having declared its intention to ban all email use by its employees, IT company Atos announces some of the details: in phase one, employees will use only Jabber, Facebook, and Twitter internally. The details are announced in an email message to the employees and the press.
• Apple announces that, while Steve Jobs had said he was willing to spend $40B on the patent litigation with Google over Android, they are, as a gesture in honor of his memory, doubling that amount to $80B.
• HP announces its latest new direction: they will revive the WebOS platform by merging it with PalmOS. “By combining the best features of two failed operating systems, we believe we can give consumers the best failed system ever,” says CEO Meg Whitman.

February

• Microsoft is at pains to remind potential customers that WinHealth 1.0 is only a prototype, but by the end of the month, 2/3 of the hospitals in America have already signed on.
• Buoyed by the success of Office 365 and Kinect, two of the most successful products in the company’s history, Microsoft announces “Kinect 365,” a revolutionary product that allows office workers to keep in shape while they work, using their entire bodies to control office applications.
• A minor slip on Facebook allows all Atos employees to learn that CEO Thierry Breton’s nephew has been arrested for public indecency at the Paris zoo. The company quickly decrees that employees need to use separate Facebook accounts for their work and private lives, with the work account names beginning with “atos-” to clarify their role.
• Apple’s patent attorneys petition congress for a visa exemption to bring in patent attorneys from other countries. “We just can’t hire them fast enough,” says CEO Tim Cook.
• HP announces that it is killing the newly announced WebPalm merged operating system. “We were just kidding,” says CEO Meg Whitman. “We really meant to focus on WebOS all along. Um, or was it Palm?”
• IBM testifies before congress that there’s no need for more H-1 visas allowing foreign engineers to work in the US. “American talent can compete with any in the world,” says CEO Ginni Rometty. Congress, impressed, shelves the visa issue. As IBM stock hits 200, Rometty begins a three month tour of IBM’s operations in India and China.

March

• The first production version of WinHealth — inexplicably numbered WinHealth 3.1 — is released. A major limitation is that it only allows doctors to treat one patient at a time, although Microsoft points out that this wouldn’t be a problem if doctors would just use a different computer for each patient. The system uses a blue screen to indicate a patient’s death, which doctors and techies find amusing, but not patients or their families.
• Using the handy new “atos-” naming convention, Atos’ competitors (and recruiters) find that they can quickly identify and communicate with all Atos employees on Facebook, leading to a massive raid on Atos’ talent. Atos announces they will be moving to LinkedIn. The announcement is made by email.
• Google announces a dollar-for-dollar match with Apple’s spending on the Android-related patent lawsuits. “May the company with the deepest pockets win,” says Eric Schmidt.
• The New York Times pioneers a new business model by requiring all visitors to their site to pay for their content, unless they type “pretty please” into a secure dialog box. “This ensures that no one will have access to our content without paying,” said a spokesman, “unless they really, truly want it.”

Part Two of my predictions may be found here.