* Knowledge contained in e-mail needs to be managed
From IT’s perspective, e-mail management is about keeping an e-mail system up and running, maintaining servers so that they provide extremely high reliability with minimal investments in administration, managing the flow of traffic, and so forth. From e-mail users’ perspectives, however, e-mail management is much more about managing the content they generate, as well as the content generated by co-workers and others. Knowledge management in the context of e-mail is a seriously underserved market. While many users employ e-mail simply for sending information and not as an information repository, a significant and – I believe – growing proportion of e-mail users employ e-mail for the latter purpose. Because an e-mail system is a freeform database that can contains a wide variety of critical business information, I believe that users, given the choice, would use e-mail much more for knowledge management purposes than they do currently.
From IT’s perspective, e-mail management is about keeping an e-mail system up and running, maintaining servers so that they provide extremely high reliability with minimal investments in administration, managing the flow of traffic, and so forth. From e-mail users’ perspectives, however, e-mail management is much more about managing the content they generate, as well as the content generated by co-workers and others.
Knowledge management in the context of e-mail is a seriously underserved market. While many users employ e-mail simply for sending information and not as an information repository, a significant and – I believe – growing proportion of e-mail users employ e-mail for the latter purpose. Because an e-mail system is a freeform database that can contains a wide variety of critical business information, I believe that users, given the choice, would use e-mail much more for knowledge management purposes than they do currently.
This is evidenced by the growing use of search tools that are focused, at least in part, on e-mail. Google, Yahoo, MSN and Qurb, for example, have all recently introduced search tools that index e-mail content and that allow users to search through that content extremely rapidly. You can search through a 1G-byte data store for a keyword in under a couple of seconds. In my own case, I use one of these search tools a minimum of five to 10 times each day, far more than I would have estimated I would use it had I been asked about the utility of such a tool prior to its introduction.
The utility of these search tools points out the underserved need of e-mail users for a rapid search capability that can make e-mail content much more accessible and much more useful for productive work. By extension, this points out the value that just an e-mail store can provide in making users more productive.
