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?

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.

--

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.