If your answer is yes, and for most of us it is yes, you need to consider banning internal email and embracing a new generation collaboration platform such as Microsoft’s Yammer or Salesforce.com’s Chatter.

Two excellent posts discuss the problem email is causing and the solution.

In a Forbes article by Shayne Hughes, the chief executive of Learning as Leadership, he explains why he decided to ban email in his organisation for a week. Shayne correctly observes that: “we clog one another’s e-mail systems and to-do lists with a mishmash of crucial topics and trivial information and then waste hours of every day slogging through a hundred useless e-mails to ensure we don’t look irresponsible by missing the two or three important ones”.

Shayne says, “culture change begins with you. You and your team can choose to be buried by e-mail or empower yourselves to put boundaries around it.”

Cloud computing advocate Andy Pattinson agrees with Shayne in his latest blog post and goes one step further to recommend that email be banned.

He says Chatter adoption has cut his internal email traffic by 90 per cent.

Andy claims that his “default position for all internal comms is now Chatter”.

If you want to know what that world is like, here’s Andy’s description: “all communication is now contextually relevant, if it’s about a client its against their account or contact record, if it’s about an opportunity we’re working on, it’s on the opportunity record. If it’s about a project, it’s on a project record, if it’s about development or any number of different topics it’s in the relevant group in Chatter.

“All communication is now searchable, it’s located where it’s needed and anyone can help when a question is asked, business is significantly faster as a result.

“I can’t recommend the transition to Chatter enough, you’ll wonder why you stuck with email for so long.”

As I said back in June 2012, enterprise-wide social collaboration simply makes good business sense.

Social technologies, especially mobile-enabled technologies, are changing the way we all communicate, internally and externally, transforming how brands engage, harvest actionable insights and generate revenue.

If a company’s bureaucratic culture gets in the way and the leadership fails to wake up, marginalization and irrelevance is around the corner.