What is the best combination of knowledge management software/solutions that can save a small company from “email hell”?
I would like to help a small company with their biggest problem - they are drowning in their internal email. They make money on Time &
Materials billable professional services contracts but the volume of email communication about internal issues, training, recruiting,
status reporting, etc is too distracting to manage all the required billable hours without working lots of overtime. This phenomenon was
labeled 2.5 years ago by Dr Glenn Wilson as “infomania” http://discovermagazine.com/2005/aug/email-make-you-dumber/
Most communication occurs via email where the content is pushed to the recipient, often at a time when they don’t need it. Some examples of
this communication are status reporting, policies, announcements, etc. I believe the company could benefit from having the information
available centrally but allowing the users to pull it when they need it, rather than bombarding their inboxes constantly.
Some initial ideas are to use forums or blogs for announcements, which also allows for reader comments to be visible to all. Use a wiki for
team collaboration and use a portal or intranet for policies, shared documents, etc. I believe the ideal solution would be to have a list
of RSS feeds (possibly in a tree-view or on a customized portal like Google homepage) that alerts the users to the latest content but keeps
their inboxes free to deal with client and project issues.
Do you have a recommendation for the best overall communication and information sharing architecture that allows for information to be
pulled on demand rather than pushed? Which of these software solutions should be considered? rightNow!, edumagination, googleDocs,
groupSwim, daptiv?
Thanks,
Sean M.
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