The problem here – for me at least, and I'm not exactly the greatest traditionalist on the planet – is perspective. Until I left the organisation I just didn't 'feel' how tragic this waste was.

Email is sometimes the only place where people feel they have control over their documents, I've found. They email themselves all their work as attachments so they can get it at home and so they don't have to conform to some ridiculous IA imposed by IT.

Meetings are a mystery to me. I think part of the solution to this is to replace them with a new technology that feels just as important. We've got the email replacements all wrong in the past because we haven't learned how to do in-the-flow stuff as well as people can do it with email. Equally, we need something that's above-the-flow – with added pomp and circumstance – that will replace meetings.