Whither the future of internal corporate communication?

I was recently contacted by Noysi, a Spanish company that provides internal corporate communication solutions, who wanted to hear my opinion about new trends in internal corporate communication, a sector I have been monitoring for many years now, as well as writing about, and one that is undergoing rapid transition as it moves away, once and for all, from paper toward greater efficiency.

Paper technology dates back to the second century before Christ. The reasons companies are still so attached to this archaic medium is largely to do with anchoring information in something physical, but in the times we now live, paper is the worst enemy of productivity and efficiency, as well as being an obstacle to the effective circulation of information. We could probably get a very good idea of a company’s efficiency by weighing the amount of paper it produces.

We have moving away from paper toward the email since the 1970s, as the advertisement above shows. Paper is now an obsolete technology, at least in terms of corporate communication. These days, most senior managers would not be able to answer all the emails they are copied into: there just isn’t enough time. The CC, which has become a kind of witness to management, scaling the company hierarchy, has already proved itself to be a highly inefficient means of communication within companies.

Working on shared documents and instant messaging look set to take over. Obviously, I’m not talking here about using something as flimsy as WhatsApp in a corporate context, but tools that combine these features with others, such as project management, and that offer sophisticated information storage capabilities, archiving, establishing channels and groups, and all protected by the security that corporations need.

I haven’t tried Noysy yet, but it is part of a very interesting market which is going to become very competitive at all levels — proof that we are talking here about a transition, not some flash in the pan. Among the main players looking to carve themselves a slice of the corporate communication pie are Slack, one of those unicorn companies already worth more than $1 billion, along with Microsoft’s Yammer, or Asana and Trello, which have been developed via project management. These are tools that suggest agile communication, and offer huge possibilities for circulating information under the necessary controls, and that above all, provide a reasonable balance in terms of efficient communication.

If you can’t see the advantages of working on shared documents using the tools mentioned above, then you obviously haven’t tried them: the advantages are so clear that it is hard to understand how any company can hope to be remotely competitive without them.

(En español, aquí)