For most businesses today, 90% of the heavy lifting for internal communications is handled via one mechanism: electronic mail. This despite historic issues with that medium in terms of organization, security risk (both of information exposure-one of my clients just received an e-mail from a major corporation with which they do business which someone had inadvertently forwarded to them containing juicy details of internal conversations over contract negotiations-and of exposure to viruses and worms), and usability. With the volume of spam increasing dramatically in the past few years, and the resources required to combat it, e-mail is becoming less and less useful all the time.

It's been apparent to some of us for quite a while that there are much better alternatives now for many corporate communications functions. Now, CIO Magazine has posted an article on using blogs internally to streamline project management.

Oddly enough, the article suggests that e-mail is still the prevailing tool because IT departments prefer top-down hierarchical controls over communication which aren't necessarily beneficial to the user, and are resistant to change. While I won't argue that IT staff aren't frequently resistance to change (they aren't alone in this), I more commonly see users who aren't ready to give up their e-mail and try something different, not IT departments. I think much of this, as I suggest in the other post linked above, is due to the personal nature of e-mail and the illusion of privacy it presents. Either way, a lot of education will be required in most companies before technologies such as blogs, intranets, and message boards will start to fill out the gaps in the legacy e-mail system.