Impressive news from France: last week Mr. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos Origin (a 49,000 employee global IT Services company) has announced that the company aims to be email-free in three years.

More impressive is the fact that this is evidently not just talk; Mr. Breton, speaking to the press, has justified this decision with an insightful set of observations, which in turn are grounded in hard data collected by the company and others. He also reports that his company has been implementing new tools that will eventually replace email for internal communications, notably collaboration and social networking platforms.

I’ve been preaching a move from email towards other platforms – internal social networks, blogs and RSS feeds, shared workspaces and so forth – for some years now; but this is the first time I see a large corporation deciding to make such a bold leap. And they’re likening the situation to the trend of curbing physical environmental pollution in the aftermath of the industrial revolution – a bold analogy.

Of course God is in the details, as the saying goes; it is interesting and important to consider what is involved in this plan. Obviously email itself is not going away entirely; they will need it to communicate with their external customers and stakeholders. And they will need a method to bridge external email and internal networking: if you want to forward a message from a client to a coworker, you will not want to start cutting and pasting, especially if the coworker needs to respond to the original sender. But three years should be enough to solve such issues if they have their mind set on it, and they clearly do.

The most heartening fact in this story is that the deal seems driven with great enthusiasm by the CEO. Furthermore, this CEO sounds convinced of what I’ve been saying for 15 years: email overload imposes a severe toll on the company’s ability to succeed. With such role modeling and leadership, Atos Origin should have a good chance at making this drastic change a success.