Companies need to stop relying on email as their organization’s central nervous system. Sure, email isn’t going away – it’s still a reliable way for people and businesses to connect and communicate with external sources. But it’s no longer scaling appropriately as a nexus for employees interacting internally. A study at Intel found that onaverage, employees spend an average of 20 hours per week managing 350 emails, costing an enterprise organization of 50,000 an average of $1 billion each year. (Executives can get 300 to 500+ emails a day.) Email has become the paper memo: an inefficient vehicle for moving information across the enterprise.

Activity streams are the future of interoffice communications, and at Socialcast our vision is that they will redefine enterprise collaboration. Fast. Gartner recently predicted that by 2012, activity streams will be used by over 50 percent of enterprises. Activity streams first became popular in the consumer sector, rapidly becoming a dominant form of information consumption—Facebook and Twitter are now central to modern social life. A revolutionary alternative for intra-company communication, the activity stream is poised to make its mark in the business sector by replacing a huge chunk of the email sprawl that is bogging down employees.

The fact is that enterprise organizations are already making a decisive shift from file-centric collaboration to relationship-centric collaboration, and the trend is growing. A report from Forrester forecasted that Enterprise 2.0 will grow into a $4.6 billion industry by 2013, with social networking software garnering the largest market share.

My prediction is that activity streams will soon take the lead as definitive facilitator of enterprise collaboration. Email isn’t dead, but it will certainly become less relevant for internal communications as organizations move to prevent death by information overload and increase meaningful interaction across departmental and location boundaries. Activity streams deployed into employees’ existing workflow have the power to alleviate the pain and streamline the purpose of email while uniting people, data and business applications.