Taming the Email Beast

Information, not Knowledge

One interesting thing to come out of conversations with enterprise IT thought leaders at the Gartner Portals Collaboration and Content summit in LA last month was people are still wary of Knowledge Management solutions. My impression is that KM reached peak hype in the late 1990s and has since delivered mixed results. I've previously heard of KM deployments being referred to as ‘knowledge landfills' so I wasn't really surprised.

What did surprise me is that our Taglocity Groups solution seemed to getting branded as a knowledge management solution.  We initially positioned it, in part, as a knowledge sharing solution but no matter how much I explain that knowledge sharing is different to knowledge management, the connection persists.  So we'll just change it from knowledge sharing to information sharing.

Many people use the words ‘knowledge' and ‘information' interchangeably anyway, and certainly the market hasn't helped to differentiate between the two.  Internet research reveals all kinds of ways to describe the differences, but this article on Wikipedia touches on the pain Taglocity Groups solves:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload.  It states "Email remains a major source of information overload..." 

This is applicable to us because Taglocity Groups provides a platform to minimize the disruptions and inbox clutter that non-actionable informational email creates. Instead, this type of email belongs in a group inbox for people to access when and how they need it.

So how does this sound for new positioning:  Taglocity Groups is a non-disruptive email productivity and information sharing solution for agile enterprises to reduce email overload and transfer knowledge?

Hmmm, can't seem to get away from the K word.  Let's try this then: Taglocity Groups is a private online service for groups of people to collaborate via email, share information, locate expertise, and reduce email overload.  Yes, I think this will help keep Taglocity from getting lumped in with last century's cumbersome knowledge management solutions!

Opportunity or Threat?

As the DOW gave up almost 7% in a single day today, I began wondering what the implications of a global financial melt-down would mean to small businesses like ours.  We solve real email management problems for professionals and businesses, not consumers.  Does that shield us from tightening purse strings or make things worse?

The optimist in me says that because we improve productivity at a very low cost, our products and services will be even more in demand than before.  If the effects of the economic climate lead to higher unemployment and mass layoffs, I imagine those fighting to keep their jobs will want to stand out from others.  One way to do that is to be more productive, make fewer mistakes, and produce higher quality work by leveraging other people's knowledge.  Taglocity 2.0 is a tool that provides these benefits to individuals.

But this goes beyond individuals.  Corporations will need to compete even more fiercely in the changing global landscape.  We developed Taglocity Groups to improve overall corporate performance, not just by improving the productivity of one person and their inbox at a time, but by improving the productivity of entire teams and departments.  Here is a rough idea of how it works:  www.taglocity.com/discovermore.html

But the pessimist in me says go easy everybody, be conservative, and expect the worst because we're in uncharted territory.  Who knows? 

As for Taglocity, we're conservative by nature.  Our business plan is not based on hype and getting millions of 'eyeballs' but rather on provding real solutions to real pain at a very reasonable cost.  Fortunately we have 'staying power' and can afford to ride this out for a while.

In the meantime, let's all work hard together to get through these uncertain times as quickly as we can!

Dave Towert

Saving Email - A Brief History

A few years ago, David Ing, our CTO and co-founder, came to the same conclusion as many others at the time:  email, the killer productivity application of the 90s, was breaking down. 

Or as he put it, "Email is basically broken. Or rather it is at the stage where its bad habits are institutionalized and accepted as the norm." He predicted that productivity gains would be eroded to the point where people would want to throw it out. 

Sure enough, wikis, blogs, and other intranet solutions popped up in attempts to solve the burgeoning email overload problem.  These solutions built on the premise that people use email for purposes it wasn't designed for, so why not offload the work onto other purposefully designed systems?

Well as it turns out, people love email too much, or it's simply too convenient and easy to use for collaboration and information sharing.  So after witnessing mixed results, David came up with a brilliant idea:  instead of making people leave email, rather extend it to support the way people like to work!   

Why not extend it to easily allow people to place information in a fixed location in context?  Why not let people browse and subscribe to this information? Why should email be a ‘push' only system?  Why not extend it to support ‘pull' like wikis and blogs? 

In other words, give people the benefits of wikis and blogs but do it with their email program of choice in a non-disruptive way.  Give people less email to process but access to more information on-demand, on their terms.

And so Taglocity 2.0 was conceived!  Now two very busy years later, Taglocity is nearing the end of a very successful six month beta program.  And we certainly owe a debt of gratitude to all of our beta users for their encouragement and feedback over the last 6 months - thank you very much!

We are very excited about how David's vision has been realized in terms of the solution.  Stay tuned for our official launch where we look forward to helping solve email overload and improve knowledge sharing for as many individuals and businesses as we possibly can.

We hope to use this new blog to start a useful dialog about saving email and getting people to love it all over again.  Please let us know your thoughts!

David Towert
President & CEO