GrexIt

Why its hard to tap email inboxes for Knowledge

We have, right from the day we started conceptualizing and developing the idea behind GrexIt, been very sure that GrexIt has to be a tool focused on helping people at organizations tap the knowledge and information hidden in email inboxes. We have, over the last 12 months, built GrexIt feature by feature into a tool that is designed ground-up to help people do exactly that.

Whats so hard about it, you may ask. Well, we have come to understand that a product that helps you tap knowledge from emails has to be very different from a document repository or a collaborative tool like project management software. We're outlining our key learnings about this problem which make it very unique.

  • Conversations are important, not just messages or parts of them: Most of the time, it is the complete conversation which must be preserved and archived for people who read them to understand the context and derive any value out of it. This makes it very important for the tool to be able to track conversations as they happen after it has been saved once.
  • Duplication can easily happen: Multiple people who were a part of an email conversation might save the conversation, leading to duplication and clutter. The tool must have the capability to detect and avoid duplication.
  • Attachments are important: Any tool that helps tap knowledge from emails must handle file attachments cleanly. Attachments contain a lot of valuation information, and must be well organized, categorized and searchable.
  • Contacts are information: Even the email ids of the people involved in a conversation are usually useful information. The contacts might be customers, vendors etc., or might even help discover who are the experts on a specific subject. The tool must grab the contacts in email conversations and store them in such a manner so as to make them available for further use.
  • Access Controls must be well implemented: Since a lot of emails contain private and sensitive information not fit to be accessed by everyone in a company, it should be very easy and intuitive to apply access controls on the email conversations saved.
All of the above, and a lot more has gone into how we've designed GrexIt. If you are on Google Apps, sign up for our private Beta at http://grexit.com. It might just save your life!

Do you know what you know

Well, I know what I know, but does my company, as a company, know what it knows, and does it draw on this knowledge frequently?

There are two very important aspects of this problem, which we call the What and the How:

  1. What: Exactly what is worth knowing, retaining, remembering, and drawing from. Its a hard problem, because these nuggets of knowledge are usually hidden beneath tons of communication and material which, although very important, has no enduring value. That useful email conversation with a client, or that important document can easily get lost between mounds of notes, emails and documents we generate as a company every week.
  2. How: Once (1) is figured out, how easy is it to take these nuggets out of the tons of material that its hiding under, and put it into a place that allows everyone to access it when they need it. How easy is it to find the right stuff, and how to make it so easy to use that the right stuff just shows up by itself when its needed.

As a company, and as an individual, there is nothing worse than not drawing from what has been learnt in the past. For people, it can disastrous, and for companies more so. What does your company do to address the What and the How of this problem?

Basecamp should love email a bit more

If you've used Basecamp, chances are pretty high that you love it. We do. I have, in the past, used Basecamp to manage a bunch of consulting assignments, and Basecamp really made our life easy. We have worked with many task management and collaboration tools, and I must say Basecamp takes the cake when it comes to being simply, purely functional. For projects that are not very long drawn and not very complex, Basecamp offers just the right set of tools to get the work done smoothly.

But having used Basecamp to manage and collaborate on some fairly large projects that ran for more than 2 years and involved around 15 people, we have come to believe that Basecamp needs to play much better with email than it currently does. The following are some of the scenarios that came up while managing some really large projects which made us think so:

  • Email conversations on a project happen even before the project "starts": Before a large project starts, and is even finalized, there are loads of communication about the project regarding architecture, design, technology and planning. In a consulting set-up, a lot of this happens before the project is awarded to the contractor / consultant / freelancer. Now once the project starts, communication can almost completely shift to Basecamp, but all these email conversations with useful information stay inside email inboxes, completely detached from where all the action is happening. 
  • While Basecamp gives a place for all team members on a project to interact on, there is a lot of communication which might need to involve people who are not team members on the project. Example: while working on a specific problem on a project, you might need to talk to experts who might not be a part of the team working on the project. Some of them might not even be a part of your company. In scenarios like this, the communication mostly happens over email, and again, does not show up inside Basecamp.
  • Feedback, issues and bugs reported by users, customers, testers and friends end up becoming tasks in Basecamp a lot of times. Now since a lot of these issues reported are over email, Basecamp seriously lacks ways to convert such emails into tasks, and then also continue the conversation with the person who reported the issue from inside Basecamp. 

There are other scenarios too, but these are the most important ones. In general, we strongly feel all collaboration tools must play very well with email in order to be completely effective.

 

The Power of the Collective Inbox

Let us start by asking you one quick question: What is your single most important go-to source of information at work. If you answer its your email inbox, then what we're going to say now would make perfect sense to you.

For a lot of us who spend a lot of our time communicating with our colleagues at work, email goes way beyond being just a communication tool. With multi-GigaByte inboxes that we are used to now, our email inboxes are probably the richest sources of information at our disposal, containing information that is inherently very contextual because it was sent to us by someone who thought it makes sense to us. If you are using an email service with very high quality search like Gmail, searching your inbox almost becomes second nature. Along with the power to organize your conversations offered by labels, your email inbox transforms itself into a potent tool that stores stuff that is of immense value to you, and also makes finding useful stuff very easy.

Here, we call for a little exercise of your imagination for a moment. For a minute, imagine how it would be if you could search every inbox in your organization, just like you search yours. If you could write in a bunch of keywords, hit enter, and you could have results from the email inboxes of anyone in your company.

Powerful? You bet! You could instantly find:
  • Answer to a question you have which was answered by someone in your company an year back
  • A document you need from a colleague's inbox
  • Know if someone else has handled a client query similar to what you have to answer now
  • Quickly find who in your company interacted in the past with client, a vendor or a service provider
The list could go on really. Thats what is the power of the "Collective Inbox" as a searchable, browsable repository of information which is really like an organizational memory for a company. Now if only we could figure out a way to share only the right stuff with the right people, we could all work so much better.

What do you think?

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(This post also outlines the core idea behind our product, GrexIt.)