Apologies everyone for no post activity today. Had my hands full with a series of meetings so trying to get this one in under the wire. Will make up for lost time tomorrow.
Microsoft and Cisco to play nice for unified communications
Civil competition? Or maybe "frenemies" as Microsoft and Cisco are moving more and more into each others respective spaces (software and networking) under the banner of unified communications. Today’s announcement "Cisco, Microsoft says competing products to mesh" looks to set the tone for this continuing battle/love affair.
Why I am a fan of Paul Kedrosky and you should be too
There are lots of folks in the broader on-line world that publish opinion, analysis, and ramblings on a daily basis. As someone with a short attention span and in need of meaningful information, I seek out folks that provide information relevant to my needs or interests in a consistent, informed, and compelling way. There are no barriers to entry for setting up a blog minus some basic understanding of grammar, so how do you pick the value voices above the noise?
One such voice is that of Paul Kedrosky and his blog "Infectious Greed." I’m not sure how I even found him to begin with, but he is an informed commentator on capital markets, venture capital, and start-ups among many other things. I decided to let him know I was a fan via an unsolicited email and he sent me a very nice response. That is cool. I more than anyone else know that email is an increasingly ineffective tool for communication, but wanted to let Paul know I enjoyed his writing and email was the best way to do that.
Thanks Paul for getting back to me (although you didn’t need to) and thanks for your continued insight on things that are important to me.
Sunday at the ballpark
Not the nicest day today in Seattle with rain and temps in the mid-60s. However, not too much to complain about as the rest of the country is steaming especially friends and family in the Southeast. My Dad says that Nashville continues to experience scorching temps and Atlanta is not faring much better. So after putting our fleece on and heading out to Safeco Field, we had a great time with several friends watching the ball game. Ichiro is a helluva ball player…no doubt about it. That whole movable roof thing comes in handy when the weather is rainy. This was a pretty significant game as it was our daughter’s first major league game. Although I have a love/hate relationship with baseball at this point dating from the strike year of 1994, there are few things that compare to stepping into the stadium when a game is going on and a great crowd today delivered. Mariner’s won, they had Full Sail on draft, and a good time was had by all.
A run and a few beers in Woodinville
Had a good time yesterday at the Covey Run 10k/5k. The 5k allowed strollers and was a good excuse to head to Woodinville yesterday morning for a short run with friends. It was the first year for this event and they did a great job. It was sponsored by Covey Run wines and for the benefit of Children’s Medical Center. I’m still nursing a bit of a sore foot so this was a way to combine a short run with a few beers on the patio at Red Hook Brewery afterwards. Red Hook is on the Burke-Gilman Trail and a worthwhile pit stop (or destination). Just a short distance from Seattle, Woodinville is home to many of Washington’s wineries including great ones like Matthews Cellars. Here’s more details.
Why corporate email is broken
In order to correct a problem, you must understand what is causing it. There is no dispute or disagreement about corporate email being a "broken" tool/process/technology. The question is – what can you realistically do about it incorporating all the elements previously discussed here including habits, regulations, laws, and existing processes? We’ll get to that. For now, here is a way to frame the problem on two levels – Risk & Operations.
Risk
Targeting the risk aspects of email proactively has close parallels to why you have insurance. You only need it if something happens. Well, just as cars run into each other every day, your employees are doing things every day to that expose your firm to risk and possibly liability. The "something" is happening! It may not always escalate to an incident/investigation/lawsuit, but it does have real business impact. Burying your head in the sand or deciding to address it after it happens is a less than prudent way to handle it.
Liability – every email sent is a date/time stamped record of activity and often get labeled as "smoking gun" emails because of the conclusive and indisputable truth they convey.
Retrieval headaches & discovery pain – firms struggle with finding it all in every nook and cranny as well as proving that their copy is authentic. "We don’t have that one" is a plausible defense and puts the other party in the position of proving the one they have is real, authentic, and not altered/created to prove their case.
Operations
Email is a true business process tool as its flexibility and ease of use underpin every major business process in your company. From how you invoice customers to how you negotiate contracts. That means a lot of email every day from a lot of people. Here’s the problem – it is losing its effectiveness because the meaningful stuff is being drowned out by the noise.
Volume and increasing recipient immunity – volume is growing at 20-30% CAGR and, as Malcolm Gladwell points out, we are building immunity to it. There are things banging around your email network every day that don’t need to be there. Go check your fancy copier/fax system – it sends email alerts when the toner is low. Or find out the favored tool to check network performance. My guess is that huge volumes of emails are sent to see how the network is performing.
Effectiveness and use as a direct communication substitute – it’s easier to send a message with capital letters and exclamation points than it is to have a face-to-face confrontation. I use to work with a guy like this and some of his email rants were masterpieces but he would fold like a spanked puppy in a face-to-face encounter. Email is not a substitute for conversation and definitely not a place for confrontation (see point on smoking gun above).
Ok great. So now I have stated the problem. I fundamentally believe that it is intellectually lazy to state a problem without being prepared with a suggested solution (reference post on "Spot it, Got it" for details).
Stay tuned…
What politicians teach us about email
Politicians as a group are generally not on the cutting edge of either technology or clear communication and this rings true for their attitudes and struggles with what to do with email at the federal, state, and municipal level. This podcast from NPR (via Boing Boing) is an interesting discussion of this topic as only NPR can do but highlights many of the same challenges that exist in the private sector about what the heck to do with the mountain of email created every day.
Many politicians like NJ Governor Jon Corzine have chosen not to use email in an effort to leave no trail or chance that something typed in a hurry could come back and bite at a later date (a true politician’s stance). As this NPR piece points out, making the decision to begin systematically deleting emails after a defined retention period can create a "perception problem" that these records are being destroyed to hide something. This story goes on to compare and contrast the Governor’s Offices in California and Virginia. California chooses to delete emails after 2 weeks while Virginia chooses to save them and burn them to disk.
One thing is for sure – there is no agreement on the best approach and whether these should be treated as historical documents or not. Contrary to the PR flack from the VA Gov’s office, I would say that the writings of Thomas Jefferson had more methodical thinking behind them due to both the effort and importance of written correspondence in the 1700s. The ease of creating and sending emails has dumbed the content down considerably so not sure this is even a worthwhile comparison.
Three things you can do today to get email under control
There are a variety of business, legal, regulatory, and even cultural issues associated with taking a proactive stance on email and addressing the risk that it brings to an organization. We work with a variety of companies and although there are certainly industry and even company-specific nuances, a minimum threshold approach to regaining control over email applies. So to really boil this down to basics, here is what you can do tomorrow (or even today) to not only mitigate risk but take real cost out of the messaging infrastructure.
1. Perform an audit of your traffic to see what is really going on
Whether you use a company like MessageGate or perform this analysis yourself, take a look at what is going on and who/what sends and receives the most of what kinds of messages. The results are eye opening and low hanging fruit abundant.
2. Implement attachment parking
The 50% of your email volume that is MS Office files can be removed from the stream by stripping the attachment and replacing it with a hyperlink to a certain file share or even MS Sharepoint. Doing this for internal traffic alone will significantly reduce server load, duplicate attachments floating around, and archive strain. No workflow disruption, no end-user changes, and minimal technology (you probably already own Sharepoint even if you aren’t actively using it….yet)
3. Implement end-user self-review for three specific things:
a. Entertainment files over 70k (image, audio, video files) sent internally or externally
b. SSNs being sent externally either in text or attachment(s)
c. Inappropriate language internally and externally
The ONLY way to fix these organic business processes (and bad habits) is to increase end-user awareness. The best way to do that is not through a training seminar or "email awareness email" but a real-time corrective response that the sender can control. Want to send that spreadsheet full of SSNs outside the company? Fine, you can override the warning but be ready with an explanation should the Privacy/Compliance folks coming knocking. Want to go a step further? Automatically encrypt an email containing an SSN as it is sent removing the the dependency on the end-user to use a tool other than their mail client.
Do these three things and you will see immediate cost and risk reductions without having to come up with a master solution to the "email problem."
Community-based definitions and who gets the final say
This story from Wired covers a nifty new tool called Wikipedia Scanner that lets you see who (what IP address) has been editing Wikipedia entries although it is somewhat old news as the examples given are all pre-2006.
I suppose there are two ways to look at this:
- Changes like those made by Diebold & Wal-Mart editing critical comments are not in the "spirit" of a "collaborative" effort like Wikipedia or as an entry stated – are "vandalism."
- Because this is a definition based on the collaborative input of the community, then everyone in the community is understood to be a participant with the "facts" rising to the top after numerous public iterations.
Now, I often reference Wikipedia definitions here because I like the fact that they are dynamic and can be a bit more colorful than Merriam-Webster. However caveat emptor because anybody can edit an entry which again is the unique thing about this social dictionary.
One person’s fact could be another person’s fiction.
Bottom line – this is a place people go for information and companies/organizations want to make sure their brands are presented in the best light possible. This should not be a surprise to anyone and is hardly scandalous.
Crisis management via Blackberry
As August is high holiday time in Europe and also a time for vacations on Wall Street, the recent gyrations in the global financial markets have occurred when many of those that play the game were soaking up the sun in their favorite beach getaway. This story from the Financial Times talks about a few folks who used their Blackberry’s as their "financial lifeline" as events unfolded and credit them with not having to cut their holidays short to rush back to the office.
Obviously emotions are running high and the stakes are huge so one can only guess at the contents of these discussions. The ability to quickly message back and forth creates a nice record as each of these emails gets neatly stored into a firm’s email archive (at least in the US in compliance with SEC 17a-4). One can only imagine what will be uncovered as the litigation heats up and e-discovery requests come rolling in. Maybe not a wise idea to send emails after a few margaritas?
Venture Vice 