Just over ten years ago, the CEO of Atos proclaimed an end to internal emails and began shifting collaboration to new social networking tools they were developing internally. Even before then, when I was CIO at Businessweek, I heard about a similar program at TCS from their CTO, Ananth Krishnan, and wrote about how CIOs must put Enterprise 2.0 high on their agenda.

What we called enterprise 2.0 back then is now part of the future of work, and declaring an end to internal emails was too early for enterprise adoption. Email improved, and we added new communication tools like messaging and video (Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Meet, Zoom, etc.).

What’s wrong with email and messaging tools?

Nothing! That is, if all you want to do is get things done with a group of small teams working independently.

But if your objective is enabling teams of teams to collaborate, manage high-velocity transformative initiatives, and maintain documentation on the organization’s platforms/practices, then messaging tools pose challenges. Video transcripts and AI-generated summaries are helpful, but what organizations need today is an integration of tools that support scalable and sustainable innovation practices and customer-driven service management.

Atlassian extends its portfolio of collaboration tools

At Atlassian Team ’23, I saw the company’s vision and strategy for the future of work.

Atlassian’s roots are in agile collaboration (Jira Software) and knowledge management tools (Confluence) for software development and agile teams practicing scrum.

They added Jira Service Management (JSM) in 2013, which now has 45,000 organizations using it for different service management functions, including ITSM, HR, finance, and marketing. JSM helps teams manage requests, incidents, changes, and assets, bringing order to chaos for many departments relying on emails and spreadsheets.

In 2021, Atlassian launched Jira Work Management, a tool for non-tech departments to manage their project work and collaboration.

Atlassian focuses on team coordination and collaboration

Atlassian continues to launch innovations to support collaborative and digital ways of working. They launched Atlas in 2022 to improve collaboration across teams, and here at Teams ’23, they announced Atlassian Together, a way for companies to buy Trello, Confluence, Atlas, and Jira Work Management as a bundle.

With these tools, CIOs can build toward a digital and collaborative future of work.

Teams can choose Jira Software or Jira Work Management to oversee project work, while day-to-day tasks, requests, and issues can be tracked in Jira Service Management. Teams build knowledge bases in Confluence and use Smart Links to pull in rich information from Atlassian’s products, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Miro, Figma, Gitlab, and other integrated products.

To be clear, these tools don’t make internal email obsolete but greatly reduce the need for people to collaborate outside of their workflow tools. Atlassian makes this possible through integrated Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom communications.

Atlassian offers ways to automate sending email notifications and using inbound emails to trigger workflows. But I believe that people will reduce and possibly eliminate internal emails over time as they do more of their work efficiently in open, integrated workflow tools.

“At Atlassian, Confluence is our core communication and collaboration tool,” says Sendhil Jayachandran, head of product marketing, Work Management for All at Atlassian. Yes, Atlassian drinks their own Cool-Aide, and between their culture and collaborations, they churn out product features and innovations aggressively.

Embedding generative AI in your organization’s workflow and knowledge bases

Take Atlassian Intelligence and their jump into the world of generative AI and large language models. The AI is being integrated as a platform capability across products, effectively adding an enterprise AI assistant across workflow information and knowledge bases. They demoed summarizing meeting minutes, automatically creating hovers that de-jargon internal terminology, and asking questions that get translated to JQL, Atlassian’s Jira Query Language.

Atlassian also announced several innovative Confluence features, including whiteboards and tools to extend knowledge to external users.

CIOs looking to develop a future of work platform and improve employee experiences should look at Atlassian’s offerings to reduce meetings, minimize emails, and improve collaboration.

Maybe, just maybe, internal emails will go end of life.