An insight on Email for corporate needs (4)

Keep record of important information

During our course of work, there are a lot of useful information that we will archive. It may be for future reference or as a proof in black and white.

However, is email the best tool to exchange and keep knowledge? Let us take a look. What are the advantages?

• Convenient - Email has been our way of life and it is really convenient to reply or forward email to another one.


• Control - Email allows us to determine the circulation list.


• Tracking - It is possible to track whether someone has read your email with Outlook


• Getting attention - Usually people keep their inbox open at all times, therefore replies are mostly quite promptly.

What are the disadvantages?

• High changes of losing the knowledge

I have encountered several incidents that large collection of useful emails are lost when computers are infected with viruses or spoilt. This is in spite of the effort to prevent virus infections and repeated calls to backup the data.

Next, these valuable information are lost when someone leaves the company. Nobody will transfer all the useful emails from their PCs to their colleagues.

• Tedious in transferring the knowledge

Plus it is a hassle to search for information when someone else requests for it. Would it be good if they can search the information by themselves?

• Time consuming and disruptive

And a lot of time is wasted reading several emails from the same thread when actually the last email has all the useful information. Gmail has a really good solution on this

Besides that, it can be quite disruptive with emails coming in that are just "For your information only". They can be batched together to read at scheduled intervals.

• Difficulty in maintaining the accuracy of the knowledge

There are also a few occurrences where the information being circulated are not fully accurate. It may be caused by the lack of the knowledge by the author and missing out the subject experts in the circulation list to correct the inaccuracies. This could happen despite corrections have been made as an older version of the email thread are being circulated around.

• Tracing the soure of the knowledge

Sometimes for a long email thread, people will delete the non-important portion of the conversation. Subsequently, it will be difficult to track the source and original rationale of the conversation.

This post is a continuation of the previous post.
You can read the previous posts:

1. An insight on Email for corporate needs
2. Keeping track of assigned tasks
3. Getting notified for meeting requests

My knowledge vs Our Knowledge

According to ComputerWorld, the #1 pitfall of corporate social networking is the desire to protect "personal intellectual property". I am also guilty of this pitfall. Instead of posting my thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 in a centralized site such as wikipatterns, I am writing on my own personal blog and thus limiting my readership and not maximizing the value of collaboration.

Despite that, I will still continue to maintain this blog because

• It allows me to build and maintain my distinct identity
• I am not restricted by the content and structure of things I write
• It gives me a direct feedback of how useful my posts are (with the # of visitors)
• I can track easily all the comments.
• It is difficult to identify my contribution in a small section of a long essay.
• People usually will give more attention to the first and last author of the page
• People usually will give more attention to the main article as compared to all the comments.
• It allows people who are interested in my articles to track my posts easily.
• My knowledge can still be linked to other knowledge portals easily. Yes! Linking is one of the useful feature of the web.

The focus should be to encourage people to contribute and to get the the content up. Subsequently it can be retrieved by search or through linking.

Mashups can be s"mashed"

A few months back, I was approached by a fellow colleague to advise on whether it is possible to extend our enterprise wiki to add a course registration feature. Within a few hours, a prototype was up and the entire course registration application was up in the next day.

This is made possible by mashups. Mashups are web applications that are assembled together from a few simple applications to perform a more complex functionality.

Enterprise Innovation has written an interesting writeup on mashups entitled "Changing the face of business".

As compared to normal applications, mashups offers a quick and cheap way to build applications and it can be done by the end users without going through the IT department. However there are a few concerns that need to be addressed:

Integration with other systems

Can the mashup link up with other systems to achieve the business objectives? Enterprise systems are mostly linked up with one another to process on the same set of data. And this is the role of the IT department to ensure the solution fits into the grand picture.

Extensibility and support of the mashups

Can the mashup scale upwards and easy to maintain in the long run?
I have written a blog previously on my plugin policy

Customization

I have encountered several requests to customize some of the features in the mashups. And this is a potential pitfall for promoting the use of mashups. Soon the mashups will become too complex such that they can only be used for a single application and their maintenance will become difficult with numerous requests coming in.

Robustness

Unlike normal IT systems, mashups are built from ready-made applications and they might not cover all the usage scenarios. Thus they may not be as robust as applications designed from scratched. Therefore mashups should not be treated as a magic pill that can be used in all scenarios.

Nevertheless, mashups are useful and can be used for simple applications and proof of concept. If it is found to be useful, then more resource can be placed to upgrade the mashups into a full system.

Timebridge

Two weeks back I organized a get-together with my friends and I tried out Timebridge and my friends told me it's great.

Timebridge is an online scheduling application.

1. You can key in the details for the meeting
2. You provide a list of available timings for your attendees to select.
3. You provide the emails of the attendees involved
4. The email is sent out for them to select their available timings. (Note: No registration is required for the attendees)
5. An email is sent to the organizer after everyone has reverted.
6. You decide on the final timing based on the consolidated replies
7. The confirmation email is sent out to everyone. The appointment is finalized

You can check out the details at the video tour at their homepage

You can using it when you want to organize a gathering next time.