That's what one company believes and is setting its ambitious sights on. , an international IT services company, is aiming to wean its 80,000-person workforce off e-mail over the next three years.

"The volume of e-mails we send and receive is unsustainable for business," says CEO Thierry Brenton. "Managers spend between five and 20 hours a week reading and writing e-mails."

Another factor leading to this initiative: Employees are relying more on social methods of communication. There's Twitter, there's Facebook and a number of other tools inside and outside the enterprise. E-mail, it appears, is starting to take a back seat to social technologies.

That revelation is one that got a lot of scrutiny a few months ago. In November 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared at the press conference for : "We don't think a modern messaging system is going to be e-mail." The catalyst for Facebook to revamp its messaging platform, he said, was a conversation with high school students who told him they rarely use e-mail today because it's "too formal."

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