Taming the Email Beast

Email is alive and well in the C suite

A recent survey revealed that CIOs still prefer email over other forms of electronic communication technologies.  The survey was based on telephone interviews with more than 1,400 CIOs from companies across the United States with 100 or more employees.

Respondents were asked, "What is the preferred way for IT staff to communicate with each other in the office?" Their responses:

"E-mail is effective for quick exchanges and keeping written records of decisions," said Katherine Spencer Lee, executive director of Robert Half Technology. "However, when conveying potentially sensitive information, nothing can replace the value of face-to-face communication."  

What does this mean to us?  Many people think the solution to solving email problems is to move away from email to other technologies, but we believe the answer is to extend email systems to provide the benefits of the new web-based communication technologies without requiring people to leave the 'comfort' of email.

For example, if a project decision made between a few people in an email thread is of interest to others, people naturally ‘push' it out via distribution lists, or manually pick recipients to CC.  What typically happens then is that because distribution lists are dynamically updated, the message will undoubtedly reach and interrupt people who don't need it, and may not reach people who do need it but aren't on the DL, perhaps without the sender even realizing it.

And when people manually pick recipients to CC, they could easily omit people by mistake, especially when there are more than just a few people involved. 

With Taglocity, the message can be sent to those who absolutely must receive it, and then CC'd to a team or project group where others subscribe to content they're interested in, or can search for it later, all without leaving email.  In other words, people ‘place' information (via email) at a fixed location in context, and others ‘pull' it on-demand.

An added benefit of this approach is that people joining teams later can be invited to specific groups where they get immediate access to important information that has been previously shared by their colleagues.

By leveraging Web 2.0 technologies like tagging, indexing, search, micro-blogging, groups, subscriptions/alerts, RSS, natural language processing, etc. all built around secure web-services, we believe Taglocity can help to shed the notoriety now associated with email.  We want email to once again contribute to improved productivity instead of email overload and information silos. 

Indeed, we want to make sure everyone prefers email, not just the CIOs.  The last thing we need is even more fragmentation in our communication technologies - email is great because everyone has it and it is so easy. Let's fix (extend) email so it stays that way!

Dave