At the start of the year we made 12 predictions for 2012 and we've been reviewing them throughout the year to see how we're doing. This month Steve Kerridge, Managing Director at Science Warehouse, reviews his prediction that '2012 will be the year that social media tools really take off in the workplace'.

When asked by colleagues for predictions for 2012, at the start of the year as part of our '12 for 12' series, I could already see a growing trend towards using more agile forms of communication indeed, within our own business this is something we have been driving for some time.

External headlines such as "The Death of Email" reinforce the view that organisations are increasingly looking for more effective ways of communicating with both customers and staff.

Earlier this year, you may have heard the CEO of Atos Origin, Thierry Breton, stating that he intends to switch all internal communication away from email by 2014. Clearly an ambitious and bold target but behind the statement lay a clear business driver to make his staff more efficient.

He said: "We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives.

At Atos we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organisations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution."

But is email likely to become a thing of the past?

Well, yes and no. It still has an important role to play in business communications. It provides a clear audit trail and a level of formality that is an absolutely vital part of effective client relationships.
But it will increasingly be replaced by other tools that are more effective at certain aspects of communication. The result of this trend is that we will need to get used to using a growing suite of communication tools and selecting the most appropriate one for each type of interaction.

For example, you might use Instant Messaging to get a fast answer to a question that can't wait; you might upload a project plan to an Online Workspace so that it can be shared in real time amongst the project team; you may even use Facebook or Twitter to communicate with your key customers as part of building closer more personal relationships with them.

Email will still have a vital role to play, probably for many years to come, but its relative importance will diminish as other tools become more widely accepted.

Like with a lot of business trends, we can look to the consumer market to see the dynamics at play. In an interview with the BBC news on technology Mr Breton from Atos noted that: "...most of the young people that we were hiring were not using email anymore after graduating from universities. They were instead mainly using instant messaging tools and social networks like Facebook".

As a fast growing software business we at Science Warehouse are continuously look for ways of using technology to do things better such as internal training days for staff members. But its not just technology that can drive better communications; agile working practices can also deliver major productivity gains. For example, short highly focused meetings between key stakeholders can mean problems are solved in hours rather than days, avoiding the endless back and forth emails that have been the norm in the past.

An example of an organisation taking advantage of the Agile working practises is Unilever who take a flexible approach to meeting business needs through Agile methods in the workplace.

In conclusion, whether driven by visionary leaders such as Thierry Breton or by young recruits who have only ever used social media, the way we communicate in the workplace is changing in my view, for the better resulting in more dynamic and effective customer and staff relationships.

- Steve Kerridge, Managing Director, Science Warehouse

See how we did with our previous prediction: '12 for 12 #9: The rise of social procurement'