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.