* Extracting the intelligence from your employees
Consider the flow of information at your organization – the way employees interact with each other, what they say to management, what management says to them, what employees say to and about your customers, and how decisions are made – all this information is stored in your e-mail system. Because e-mail is becoming the communications medium of choice for organizations large and small, and because e-mail use continues to increase year after year, e-mail systems represent an increasingly useful store of corporate knowledge.
The problem, however, is extracting what you need when you need it. One company that has developed some interesting technology to extract corporate knowledge from e-mail is Clearwell Systems, a company I’ve written about before in this newsletter. A discussion with Clearwell last week revealed an interesting application of the Clearwell Email Intelligence Platform (EIP).
One of Clearwell’s large U.S.-based customers, anticipating that a significant percentage of its employees in the baby-boomer generation will be retiring in the coming years, is using Clearwell’s technology to extract knowledge from its e-mail system so that successors can gain from the knowledge of departed employees. For example, analyzing the information stored in the company’s e-mail system has revealed how the decision was made to use a particular subsystem in one of the company’s older products. That information is now being used to help decision-makers decide which vendors to use in the company’s most recent product.
This points out the value of retaining e-mail-based information over the long-term, analyzing this information in meaningful ways, and then making it available to the company at large. Because much of the knowledge that employees possess is often stored in e-mails, and because employees leave their companies periodically, particularly in a good economy as is the case now, it’s very important to keep this information in-house instead of watching it leave when employees do. Products like Clearwell’s can go a long way toward helping organizations preserve and use corporate knowledge.
