GrexIt

Email and Knowledge Management: The Possibilities

Being able to retain knowledge and draw on it makes good companies great. Knowledge not tapped into and lost translates into real, hard cash losses. Organizations around the world have realized this, and Knowledge retention and management are now well identified areas of research and activity.

For a Knowledge management strategy to succeed, it must tap into knowledge where its created, and in the process of its creation. That is what makes email extremely important for any Knowledge management plan. For a lot of us, our mail inboxes are the most important go-to source of information at work.

Email really 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 and knowledge 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.

Now if we could go beyond being able to search just our own inboxes, and could obtain the right information from the inbox of any of our colleagues, that could turn out to be an extremely potent tool. I could instantly find:

  • Answer to a question I have which was answered by someone in my company an year back
  • A document I need from a colleague's inbox
  • Know if someone else has handled a client query similar to what I have to answer now
  • Quickly find who in my company interacted in the past with a client, a vendor or a service provider

The list can actually go on endlessly. The challenge here is to enable access to the 'right stuff' from people's inboxes,and to the 'right people'. Making email a part of the Knowledge Management strategy of a company can help its people achieve very high levels of productivity.

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This post draws heavily from our earlier post "The Power of the Collective Inbox". This post also outlines the core idea behind our product, GrexIt.

 

 

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.)

Two important problems GrexIt solves for every organization

There are two important problems that any organization - big or small - faces, which GrexIt can help solve effectively.
  • People leaving the organization leave a lot of stuff locked up in their email inboxes. This is especially important if these employees deal with a lot of interaction with clients, vendors and other external agencies. Now as an employer you can always take control of their email inbox after they have left and look in for useful information. But then, what if an employee did not leave on a good note, and deleted stuff from their inbox that could have been useful later.
  • When new people join your organization/team, digging out email from inboxes and sending them to new joinees seems to be an accepted part of the on-boarding process. We wonder why it should be so. If you user GrexIt, your team can add all the stuff that can be useful to a joinee to GrexIt with a label like "Onboarding [project-name]", and anyone joining can just go to GrexIt and read all this stuff from there.
If these apply to you, give a thought to trying out GrexIt. It might save your life :)

Email - The Knowledge Morgue

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Shocking, but true. 

You inbox is buzzing with useful stuff: questions and answers, little tidbits of information, links to websites and documents that hold a wealth of information. The wiser among us might already be using labels/folders to organize stuff so that they can easily discover important emails when needed. Many of us might not realize the potential of the contents of our inboxes and probably even delete stuff they might need later, or never bother to look in their inbox to see if there's stuff there that might be useful to them.

There's another aspect to this - some content in your inbox is useful not just to you, but can also be useful to a lot of other people in your workplace who were not a part of the email discussion when it took place. Simple proof - we have all sometime in the past forwarded discussions from our inboxes to people who needed the information or attachments contained in them.

And that leads us to the crux of the problem - There's a whole lot of useful content lying in our inboxes which can be useful to others and to us, but would never be discovered because:
  • others don't know whats there in your inbox that can be useful to them
  • you might delete stuff that can be useful later
Isn't calling your email inbox a knowledge morgue not really an overstatement?