Robert Shaw: Leadership from the top sets a great example!

It’s been quite a while that I have contributed to this blog. But in order to prepare the discussions for next week’s conference I would like to post here a recent chat I had with one of our next week’s keynote speakers: Robert Shaw from Atos.

We had a little chat at CeBIT Webciety last week about the “Zero Email Initiative” at Atos for which Robert is in charge. The objective of this project is to put in place a Zero Internal Email policy for all internal communication by 2014. The project was initiated by Atos’ CEO Thierry Breton in 2011. The initiative was supported by the executive and senior management board from the start and is today part of the yearly objective agreements of each project managers.

At E20 SUMMIT he will give us a more in depth look on the project and the education programm in order to support the organizational change.

But while the cultural mindshift is one challenge, the right organizational setting for a cooperation without email is the another challenge. In a posting from Hubert Tardieu on the Atos blog I found the following interesting conclusion:

Supporting cooperation through the new Enterprise Social Network is the next frontier. The tools which can help are not document centric; they have to be people centric.

Two challenges have to be addressed by them:

Make the best use of the individual attention, given his/her context(location, schedule, device used as a terminal). Attention mismanagement is clearly a factor of stress and overload.

Act as a fully integrated environment which can remain available whatever terminal you use (PC at work, Smartphone on the move, PC at home) and give access to all communication tools (Phone, Unified Communications, Rssfeed, video,..) without interrupting your session involving members of your community and documents.