Reaching the right people

Imagine this situation: A company has hundreds (maybe thousands) of employees. All of them have their own skills and areas of expertise. There is probably lots of overlap, however any one person will not know everyone in the larger group who has particular skill sets. It someone is working on a project and needs assistance to overcome some technical hurdle, it could be very helpful, if they could communicate with those people who also have experience in that area. Those people might be located in entirely different parts of the company.

Semantic email addressing [PDF] aims to solve this problem:

Email addresses are a means to an end. The goal is usually not to send an email to a particular address, but to a particular person. You want to say hello to your friend Steve or send a message to the VP of marketing at Microsoft or to the head caterer for your wedding. Ideally, you could send a message to a person just by entering his or her name, position, or some other descriptive attribute. If a person’s email address changes, the email system should send to the new address automatically. If the person matching a description differs over time, the email system should send to the person currently matching that description.

In the given example, the user would be able to get answers to his or her questions by reaching out to the people with the fitting skill sets without previously having known those people: The email system can decide, who the most appropriate receivers of the messages are.

I cannot help thinking that Aardvark was at least a little inspired by the ideas behind semantic email addressing. Their process is simple: Users send in questions (using email, twitter, IM, etc.), Aarvark routes the question to another user is (hopefully) qualified to answer it and the user will eventually receive a response, often just a few minutes later. In this social search approach, Aardvark accomplishes the job of finding information by finding the right people who can provide it. The service has received very good press and was recently acquired by google.

Twitter seems like it might be a good platform for this problem area. If someone has a public twitter feed, they are essentially broadcasting their updates to the open stream and anyone can see them. It is probably safe to assume, they are at least open to the idea of talking to strangers/responding to messages from people they do not already know.

How could one go about finding the best people to message though? One method is certainly to search the message stream for specific keywords and basically manually look for people who might be active in areas of interest. You can also search in and add yourself to one of the many directories that are being developed.

But, if I simply need to talk to someone and ask them “May I ask you a question about XYZ?” then clearly, a) broadcasting my question hoping that someone will answer could be very inefficient and b) first researching who the best person might be for my question(s) puts all the burden on me.

What if the user could simply send out the question and the system would ensure that the most appropriate people see it?

The basic idea here is this: The user submits the question (along with a set of keywords) to his or her software. The software has analyzed other users’ message streams, extracted keywords, etc. and generated a knowledge base. If the query can be confidently matched to another user, a message is generated and send to that user. The message will be visible to that user as a regular name mention and they can choose whether to engage in that conversation.

Some of the obvious challenges:

• Generating of meaningful keywords/subject areas based on a person’s message stream.
• Successful matching of queries with users.
• Establishing an effective communication protocol that does not easily lend itself to abuse, i.e. spam.

A lot of web-based social networks are great at helping you connect with people you already know. Twitter makes it easy to connect with new people. The outlined approach (or a variation thereof) might be a good way of further supporting creation of those new connections, based on areas of interest.

another one on information overload

In How to Beat Information Overload, Natha Zeldes, president of the Information Overload Research Group (IORG) discusses causes and effects of information overload, in particular as it pertains to email and reports on some solution approaches.

I think this is a problem that has only been getting worse over the past decade, probably much more so over the recent few years that have brought an ever increasing variety of online messaging services, social networks, and so forth.

In general, computer technology should save us time and make us more productive. If the opposite is happening, then there clearly are pain points in dire need of optimization.

Email pollution

In No More Reply-to-All, Anne-Françoise Rutkowski and Michiel van Genuchten focus on email pollution and particularly internal pollution, which they essentially define as quantities of emails far exceeding the capabilities of recipients to effectively handle them.

Much work has been done to address email spam in recent years. Spam emails (external pollution) are typically sent from entities external to a company/group. Internal email pollution is due to an excess of emails from within a company/group. The authors argue that these types of emails can be more time-consuming than ordinary email spam:

Deleting outrageous and misleading offers from parts unknown takes only a few seconds. Reading colleagues’ e-mail messages only to find at its end that you were copied only for their convenience can take minutes.

I think this is an excellent point and it is probably also due to the fact that nowadays we often do not have to deal with many spam messages anymore: Anti-spam software has come a long way and tends to deliver a reasonable amount of protection.

The authors propose three rules to limit internal email pollution:

1. No more reply to all.
2. No more copies than originals.
3. No more e-mail fights.

Initial testing of the rules with a test group appears to have yielded positive results.

Addressing the problem is a matter of proper etiquette and training as well as good software tool support. Email spam presents an obvious (and annoying) problem, so it received attention more quickly. With most traditional email software it is hard to quantify how much time we spend with it and how much time we spend unnecessarily. I have a feeling that more and more people are becoming aware of the opportunity for improvement here. There are a number of companies out there that are working on improving email.

I am thinking rigid rules may not always be the best choice. Sometimes reply-all may be appropriate and much, much faster than adding individual names. However, reply-all to an email with more than a certain number of recipients or whose recipients contain mailing lists should at the very least raise a warning flag.

Email clients could observe and learn from our habits though. Yes, we are already able to define some rules for message handling with many different email clients. I am still hoping for clients to come up with useful rule suggestions themselves though.