One of the first areas of acclaim that Dovetail Software received for its applications – created to replace the Amdocs Clarify CRM applications – was the marvelous range of new functions that Dovetail brought to email.
“For users of Clarify data within an enterprise,
Dovetail has delivered enormous email capability not present in the
standard Amdocs deployment.” – The Dovetail Advantage: Email and CRM
Email has been called the killer app of the
Internet, and its massive usefulness requires no further explanation
here. But as the Internet has grown and evolved, and as our business
processes have changed to mesh with our online capabilities, email has
also become a problem child.
The email protocol was never
designed for the proprietary business data flowing through it. And
email applications for the most part still don’t give us value-added
ways to archive and retrieve the information locked inside of legacy
communications.
The success of email has created its own
choke points. Now that everyone has email, and knows how to use it,
everybody is discovering the power of collaboration. Email started
everyone talking, but email is not very good for more than one to one.
Collaboration is the heart of Enterprise 2.0, and Jason Hiner at Tech Republic says quite simply that Enterprise 2.0 is about building a collaboration platform that is better than e-mail:
“Enterprise 2.0 tools are about making collaboration
more efficient and effective by providing better ways for groups
(either standard teams or groups gathered for a short-term project) to
share and edit files in real time with full version tracking and easier
replication/transfer. Plus, the groups need communication tools like
IM, forums, comments, Wikis, shared whiteboards, and/or VoIP to
collaborate because e-mail quickly becomes cluttered and difficult to
track when multiple people jump into a thread.”
In the urge to work more effectively on
today’s network, and in a frustration with how difficult some things
still seem to be, it’s easy to overlook how far we’ve come, in how
short a time. Denis Pombriant reminds us.
“It’s hard to believe that not that long ago selling
was managed out of a salesperson’s head—intuitively you knew who was
serious and who was not, what was in the pipeline, when it would close,
who the competition was and a lot more.
“You kept a Rolodex and a bunch of business cards,
mostly as mnemonic devices. I never wrote anything down largely because
I didn’t want to mess with all that paper, but possibly also because I
knew my knowledge was power and in a tenuous job environment, it was
security. ” – Sales Effectiveness Through Knowledge
Pombriant in his article describes at length
how consensus builds and fractures in the same cycle when the wrong
software is managing the transfer of information.
“It takes a significant amount of e-mail to
coordinate this information from company to representative and from
sales rep to sales rep, and often it is done at the last minute.”
So emails fly back and forth – we are all
familiar with this process – and eventually messages and attachments of
drafts and final revisions “accumulate, clogging disk drives and
causing confusion because no matter how old and out of date some of
these documents are, sales representatives are loath to get rid of them
for fear they might be needed at some future point.”
Denis Pombriant then presents the final picture of the – from a knowledge management view – tragedy that has occurred:
“The result is predictable—no single version of the
truth and no point of control, which makes it hard for organization
veterans and nearly impossible for newcomers. A top-down hierarchical
approach is not much of a solution here since so much that is valuable
comes from the experiences of people in the field, so some method of
coordinating information becomes essential.” – ibid
For some answers to this travail and aggravation, tune in tomorrow…
