Archive for October 2008
Having the ability to combine data silos and reduce their contents to a single search box is the Holy Grail of computing, and like the Holy Grail it remains allusive. Google has made huge progress in integrating data from multiple sources for Internet users, however, Google can’t get behind company firewalls and it can only index what it can find. This means only a fraction of the data relevant to you has been indexed by Google or the like. The rest is locked in company databases and storage systems safe and sound from the prying eyes of YOU and Google. This means you still open your email client to search emails. You still go to the internal company blog to find that important message from HR. There is no Holy Grail of Integration that pulls everything together to make it easy for you to find and use or reuse. Or is there? (more…)
Ever feel like the picture below depicts your typical workday? You wake up in the morning with such high hopes for today’s productivity and then suddenly you’re stuck in the mud of day-to-day Corporate America. Put another way, how many of you get 50, 100, even 200+ emails a day intermixed with your 5-10 daily meetings AND on top of that you are supposed to get your REAL job done? If my guess is correct it’s most of you reading this. It seems Corporate America (henceforth called CorpAm) has become a productivity drain. Most of the people I talk to about this have the same problem; go to work from 9-6 to take their meetings and answer urgent emails, then book it home to see the kids before bed, after which start trying to answer the rest of their email and finish all their work. It’s a never ending cycle in which you fall farther and farther behind. I spoke to one mid-level executive recently who works for a multi- billion dollar company and he said he had almost 75 action items he was tracking in a spreadsheet because none of the existing tools he had found could manage the information effectively. Wow! I think the new mantra in CorpAm should be — Let’s get back our lost productivity –, or how about — Let’s take back 2 hours in our day –. (more…)
