Do you remember the first time you rode your bike without gripping the handlebar? “Hey—look—no hands!” you probably exclaimed with excitement. If you’re lucky, you ended the trip on your bike, bearing a bright smile rather than a skinned knee.

Planning for a business process management (BPM) and workflow implementation bears some resemblance to riding hands free, only on a larger scale. Whether or not you stay on course isn’t just a matter of luck. You need to know where your business is headed; understand what you are striving to achieve; streamline your processes to ensure efficient routing; anticipate the unexpected; keep a sharp eye out for change; and make changes on the fly so you remain steady till the end.

Presuming you’ve read the first two articles in this series (Developing an Enterprise Vision for Business Process Automation and Indexing for the Enterprise: Retrieve Your Documents 100% of the Time), you already learned the importance of establishing a clear organizational vision. You also know ECM is data driven, and you learned tips for effective indexing so information can be found when it’s needed and leveraged enterprise-wide. BPM and workflow build on these successes.

Whether your processes revolve around documents, represent a series of events, or both, your data is a launching pad to drive work and decision making efficiently across your organization. If you understand the unseen as well as the obvious benefits of automation, you will visualize more clearly the long-term value across the enterprise. Knowing what questions to answer before you start helps you approach your project confidently.

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I am thinking of reviving this blog yet again. I’ve been part of the System Integrator industry for a long time and have seen it from close quarters. I believe there is much hype, too many myths as well as a lot of FUD about SIs. I also think there’s a serious lack of "balanced" [...]

I went back to the Onset Blues Festival for the fifth straight time a few weeks ago It has become an essential part of summer for me. This year I saw the last three acts and they were all great…

“Work faster.”

“Get everything right the first time.”

“Outperform our competitors with better service.”

In challenging economic times, these goals are imperative. Yet achieving all three simultaneously is improbable unless you have the right tools to assist you.

Fast, accurate, friendly service helps you to be viable and competitive. At the same time, being effective is vital to cost-efficiency and customer loyalty. Unfortunately, however, fast work often generates mistakes, while meticulous attention to detail slows progress. Whether you are investing in technology and growth or are focused on doing more with fewer resources, electronic forms (eForms) and intelligent automation can help you get ahead.

According to AIIM’s State of the ECM Industry 2010 report, 41% of businesses aren’t confident that their digital information (except emails) is accurate, accessible, and trustworthy — a severe obstacle to efficiency. Forms are a small part of the web of business information. Yet when content is captured accurately and managed properly, eForms address the challenges of accuracy, accessibility, and trustworthiness while transforming service, increasing profitability, and encouraging sustainability. How? By:

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The joint is jumpin’
It’s really somethin’
The beat is pumpin’
My heart is thumpin’
Spent my money on you honey
- HAD A DREAM ABOUT YOU, BABY

It’s pretty addictive watching your blog stats, isn’t it? Remember when Google Analytics came to town and instead of waiting days to see traffic reports, you could see updates in mere hours. On a good day, you could sometimes see things in 15 minutes. Well, GA, there is a new new kid on the block, he shows you data in real time, and his name is chartbeat.

I’d never heard of it until last week when I was lucky enough to meet the cool folk at betaworks (@Borthwick and @aweissman). These guys don’t mess around – they’re behind such social media hits as TweetDeck, bit.ly and twitterfeed. You heard it here first – chartbeat is going to be big.

It’s really easy to get started – you just stick a couple of JavaScript tags onto all your pages a.l.a. Google Analytics, and you are done. The reports you get are much simpler than those from GA, but it is really real time. You can see the visitors on your site within a couple of seconds of their arrival. I wrote a test link bait post (sorry), tweeted it, and saw my 17 concurrent visitors within seconds.

Visitors to your site in real time. Notice one person is writing a comment. Click for large image.

But there is more. GA simply registers a hit when a page is loaded. chartbeat has a heartbeat and chats to the server every couple of seconds. This means that it can more accurately measure time spent on the site, user actions like scrolling (giving a nice scroll depth metric), and even keypresses. In the screenshot above, you’ll see one person is writing – they were leaving a comment at the time.

Typical detail page. Gotta love the scroll depth and engagement indicators

It also comes with a nice preintegration with backtype. This searches the social media buzz of the interwebs and reports activity as part of your report. When @izahoor, @theg, @irina_guseva, @cmsreport and @kevinc2003 were kind enough to retweet my horseshit blog post, I saw my dashboard get a bit busier and saw their link love appear shortly afterwards in the backtype console. Good stuff.

Nice integration with backtype. Click for large image.

It has an API and a bucket of prebuilt widgets. I haven’t had time to play with these, but I might add a widget here soon. The downside being, of course, it would pretty much always say “1 user currently viewing this page”. And that would be you.

It gets better. chartbeat even monitors the health of your site. While I was testing, my dickhead hosting company GoDaddy had yet another embolism, and my site flatlined for about 5 minutes. But unlike the previous million times this happened, it didn’t die silenty. I got a nice email from chartbeat informing me of the tragedy. Also, it tells you how long a page took to load for each user. 20 seconds isn’t great, GoDaddy. And yes, it has a free iPhone app too.

Because I’m a social media guru who understands transparancy and douchebaggery, I’ve shared my wonderful stats with the world. So have a look at my chartbeat dashboard.

You do have to pay a small fee for all this goodness, but it is money well spent. Buy it. Finally, a huge nod to @arctictony for helping me out.

There is a new version of mojoPortal out and about. Version 2.3.5.1 of mojoPortal offers some new features and improvements including:

• A new jQuery UI Skin – Read Joe Audette’s blog post for more details on this new feature.
• Feature Setting Groups – By adding groups, one can organize the settings into logical groups that make it much easier for the user to digest because they can view one group at a time.
• User access control by roles
• Upgrades for rich text editors TinyMCE abd CKeditor
• Upgraded to the latest MySql Connector
• Updated Italian and German resources
• The Extra Skins download file has a new skin

Additional details about the new features and bug fixes for mojoPortal 2.3.5.1 can be found in the official release announcement at mojoPortal.com.

So I promised an ECM specific follow-up to my book review on Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma.  There is a lot to talk about, so I’m not going to blather on with a long intro (though this sentence seems to be compounding the issue) and get right to it.

Or not…I have some disclaimers/notes:

• Going to try and use as much of Chistensen’s terminlogy as possible.  This isn’t to say that he has a perfect model, or even 80% model, of what is happening.  It just helps to keep the terminology consistent during this particular post.
• Every Content Management company is different and the observations will not apply universally.  Every company reacts differently.  That said, if I didn’t think that this applied to a large number of vendors, I would have targeted this post at particular vendors.

NOW we can get started.

Why Disruption Now?

There are several trains of thought out there that this dilemma doesn’t really apply to the Internet age because we are in a constant state of disruption.  This an important observation, so let me address this first.

The initial disruption was the Internet.  Since then, everything has mostly been a continuation of that disruption.  Much of the chaos has been sustaining technology for the original disruption.

Everyone agrees that the web impacted the Content Management industry strongly.  Stellant (now Oracle), Interwoven (now part of Open Text), and Vignette (now consumed by Autonomy)all came from the WCM space.  When you look at it though, it was just a new content problem.  Sustaining innovative technologies.  Unique needs, but no more so than Records Management, Imaging, or Digital Asset Management.

So what is qualifying as disruptive to Content Management these days?  Content Management itself has been disrupting the offsite paper record storage and microfiche industry, but what is actually disrupting the disruptor?  The Internet and the browser didn’t do it directly, but it became a sustaining technology for ECM.  The browser interfaces enhanced adoption over time for the existing vendors.  Definitely not disruptive.

Well, Content Management is being disrupted from a couple of directions:

• SharePoint: It isn’t SharePoint, but what it represents, basic Content Management for the masses.  It may not be the most functional, or scale to handle any situation, but it is easy to buy, install, and integrate into the most used productivity application suite, Office.
• The Cloud: Many SaaS Content Management offering cannot currently compete on functionality with the established ECM bigwigs, but that is just a matter of time.  They are established, have found a starting market, and are adding functionality.  As SharePoint demonstrated, they don’t need to match the established solutions to eat into the market share, they just need to hit the minimum requirement level, document sharing.

Open Source isn’t on the list because that is a model for solving problems, but not truly disruptive.   It is a just a different business model and not a sustaining technology.  For many, it boils down to appealing to people’s inner nature and a different pricing structure.  This is a gross over-generalization, but so is this entire post.

The Cloud could be called just a different pricing structure, but it is also a different delivery model. It is disruptive because no matter what the established vendors say, their software has not been architected for that environment, so it is not plug-and-play.

Those are the disruptions.  They are fundamental shifts in how Content Management is delivered.  They are shifts towards Content Management becoming more of a commodity (though we aren’t there yet).

Microsoft’s Attack

Okay, you can argue that they are disruptive at all or that they will just become a “sustaining technology” down the road.  If the latter is the case, most of the established vendors will survive. (Acquisitions and consolidation aside, we are talking about the actual software offerings).

When SharePoint arrived in the 2003 timeframe, it was nice, quaint, and not nearly functional enough to really have a significant impact on the Content Management market.  It wasn’t until the advent of the 2007 edition that it became an issue.

The initial response was pretty consistent, “Yeah, it does that, but it will fall apart under any real work.”  Well, the market didn’t care.  A large number of people didn’t, and still don’t, need the complicated solutions offered by the established vendors.

Over time, as SharePoint started to erode sales, the vendor strategy shifted to enhancing SharePoint.  This was fine and it started to drive sales, but SharePoint hasn’t stopped evolving.  In 2010 is has the ability to store content outside of the database, manages data better, scales better, and has better Records Management.  The need for SharePoint additional Content Management style capabilities is shifting towards archiving and governance.

When you look at this even more closely, it isn’t that SharePoint is a disruptive technology as much as it is a disruptive new vendor in the existing landscape.  So while SharePoint is very disruptive in its nature, it isn’t a “disruptive technology” as discussed by Christensen.

Still, ignore at your own risk.

The All-Encompassing Fog of the Cloud

Meanwhile, in the bushes, the cloud-based SaaS offering are lurking, ready to pounce.  They have realized a few important things:

• Not only do many people not need all of the functionality provided by the Content Management vendors, they don’t want to manage the data center either.
• Users are getting used to a rapid pace of innovation from their increased exposure to the ever-evolving Internet.  The three year “big release” has become a detriment  from an user expectation perspective, not to mention the nightmare for the IT and Change Management personnel.  Lots of incremental changes are easier to deal with than huge massive changes.
• The ability to share content outside of an organization is becoming more important, and not easier.  If I still have to email that 10 MB presentation to business partners (copying my colleagues), that really cuts into some of the important selling points of ECM.

The SaaS vendors don’t have all the answers, yet.  They are still working on security and many of the CYA features that your average CIO wants.  The thing is, those requirements are well defined, so it is just a matter of addressing them.  Research is only needed to prioritize, not define.

When those gaps are addressed by the SaaS solutions, who will win the market?  Those that are ready from day one, or those that try and create/market their solution after the questions are answered?  There is more to being a solid cloud offering than fancy marketing and a feature list.  The processes and the business value that they support is different than from a traditional software vendor.  Running a successful, secure, reliable, scalable online service is not the same as writing a COTS software package.

The Reaction

Some of the established vendors may tell you that their clients aren’t asking for the Cloud at this time.  They are asking for better business solutions, like Case Management.  Existing clients are asking for Case Management.  I’ve heard it.  The thing is that people that I talk to who are looking for new Content Management solutions are seriously considering cloud-based solutions.

How consistently are they asking? Well, in 2009 I was helping a large, 50K+ user, organization look at vendors, and they invited a SaaS provider to present their solution.  I knew going in that the vendors didn’t meet all the critical requirements, and I even told the client as much.  Didn’t matter.  They want to move in that direction as part of an overall strategy, so they were going to talk to the vendor about what the vendor offered and tell that vendor what was lacking for them to make a purchase.

Did the lack of a cloud-based solution get mentioned to the other Content Management vendors?  No.  The closest was when someone asked about external hosting and they mentioned that they had partners that can offer that service.  A savvy market research person would be able to see that question that as a potential need for cloud-based solutions, but a sales person, even if they are smart, don’t have the same channels.

But I digress and this post is already pretty long.

So the Content Management vendors, looking for double-digit growth, are pushing Case Management so they can land the multi-million dollar deals required for that growth.  Smaller cloud-based vendors don’t need to close deals of that magnitude to have double-digit growth in a quarter, much less a year.  The ECM vendors are chasing the large deals while the smaller deals get left to SaaS and SharePoint.

Christensen talks about this as companies moving up-market while the new vendors, based upon the disruptive technologies, tackle the lower market.  As the the firms innovate faster than the needs of the average customer, they can move up-market and take revenue from the established vendors.

So right now, SaaS vendors are doing this in the Content Management space.  They aren’t able to compete on functionality yet, but they are adding it faster than the market is demanding new features.  It is only a matter of time before they hit the minimum level needed for them to be a player.

There is Not Plenty of Time

As I discussed in the review, there are a ton of examples focused on the hard drive industry.  I think a more relevant example is the excavator industry.

In the first half of the 20th century, cable-actuated excavators ruled the construction world.  Each new model could scoop more thanks to larger buckets and deposit it further away.  The market drivers were bucket size and reach.

Then came the hydraulic excavators.  Made by new companies, these had smaller buckets and a smaller reach.  They couldn’t compete against the established cable-actuated vendors, but they worked well for people needing to dig precise trenches and other smaller tasks.

Over time, years and years, the bucket size and reach grew to the point that the larger construction project started to buy them.  While they could not in any way out-perform the cable-actuated excavators, they were more reliable, cost less per unit (though not less per cubic ft. bucket size), and were generally cheaper to operate.

By the end of the transition, which took decades, of the over 40 cable-actuated excavator vendors, only FOUR successfully transitioned to survive in the new market.  That is less than 10%.  Let me repeat a key fact here…

DECADES!!!

The technology was there and it was obvious.  Many established vendors entered the market once it was a viable solution for their clients, but by then it was too late.

Why didn’t they enter sooner?  Like many victims of disruptive technology, the margins were less on the new technology, which led to different processes within the makers of the disruptive tech.

Let me put it this way.  Let’s assume that I have historically made a 20% margin on my products.  I get two proposals.  One is for an innovative enhancement on an existing product that will increase sales 10-20% at the current margin.  The other is for a newly engineered solution that will increase sales around 5% at a 10% margin.  With finite resources hich do I approve?

It doesn’t matter if in 5-10 years that the second option will over-take the market, stockholders want results this year, and CEOs want their job next year.  The new markets for the disruptive tech are always fuzzy and ill defined.

This is why startups are the “source” of truly disruptive technology.  They can start with new business structures, values, and processes, that can take advantage of the different margins.  They also get more excited about that $50K deal.

Do you think EMC, Oracle, IBM, or Open Text get exited about $50K deals?

Where Does that Leave Implementers?

In reality, waiting for another post.  Let’s just say life can be good and move on to the wrap-up…

Is Pie Nuts?

While an in-depth study would be required to answer that question, not to mention my forced participation, I’m really talking about selling out to the concept.

Did I read the book, proclaim it as genius, and then seek to fit the world into the model proposed by Christensen?  Not at all.

I’ve been seeing this for a while.  Then this past Spring, I was talking about my observations about what I was seeing in the industry with some others and I was asked if I had read a couple of books.  One was Christensen’s book.  A month later, we were talking again and the book came up a second time, so I went and bought it to read.

What the book did was make me realize that what was happening was actually normal.  This happens in lots of different industries.  It is just harder to determine what qualifies as a disruptive technology in the IT field.  As computers disrupted microfiche in Content Management, the Internet is giving birth to the cloud, which is beginning to disrupt traditional data-center-based enterprise apps, like Content Management.

The best thing is that I realized that this isn’t happening because there are bad executives or managers at the established Content Management vendors, but because of the opposite.  Back to that hypothetical investment question.  What good manager would pick the investment that will increase sales by double digits?

In many ways, the established vendors are trapped by their own success.  There are ways out, but there is no set formula, I may not have the right answers, and I’ve rambled enough for now.  More later.

Flame on….

Our new book, Empowered, will be in book stores on September 14. But for a real-world conversation about what it means to unleash employees to solve customer problems using readily available technology, come to our Content & Collaboration Forum in Maryland just outside of Washington, D.C. on October 7 and 8.

Yes, this is a pitch to come to a Forrester event, but I promise you that it will be worth your time if you're looking for help with such Empowered topics as enterprise social, empowered employees, iPad in the enterprise, innovation, collaboration in the cloud, videoconferencing, and IT consumerization as well as deep dives into critical topics like search and taxonomy, enterprise content management, and what it means to be a content & collaboration leader.

You'll get two days of my Forrester analyst colleagues' presentations and face time as well as keynote presentations from some great and experienced content & collaboration executives. GM's Steve Sacho is way ahead of the curve in understanding how to turn consumerization from IT threat to business opportunity. Richard West of the defense firm, BAE Systems, is bringing his story of how investments in knowledge management and collaboration have empowered employees to work more efficiently together to solve customer problems. Both speakers as well as Zach Brand, head of all things interesting at NPR Digital Media (yes, that NPR), will share their stories, lessons, and experience.

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Philadelphia is a city dominated by the memory of Benjamin Franklin. Statues, memorials, tourist stops – seemingly everything in town honors this notable Founding Father. (The rest? That’s reserved mostly for the Philly cheesesteak.)

At the UPenn Wharton UI Conference I attended in late July (Big Ben founded UPenn, too) Franklin spoke from the hereafter to educate and enlighten on the topic of web content management.

In a great presentation about how colleges and universities deal (often perilously) with web content management, Jen Yuan of UPenn invoked some of Franklin’s most notable quotes to illustrate salient points. (In an earlier post, I reference her research that found approximately 20 CMS systems are used at Penn.)

I’ve highlighted a number of the great CMS-centric Franklin-isms below and Yuan’s deftly crafted points – applicable to non-EDUs as well.

“Haste makes waste.”

It appears Franklin foreshadowed one of the biggest and most common web content management mistakes –rushing into CMS projects. If we’ve learned anything here at the CMS Myth, it’s that acting too quickly leads to trouble. Yuan notes: schools may be good at creating spec sheets and technical requirements for a CMS, but end up trying to hustle through CMS projects to achieve their objectives. This shows up in several ways:

• Because budgets are always an issue, schools make hasty CMS decisions to implement to get a quick payback in terms of reducing the number of people and time required to manage and publish content and sites.
• EDU web committees and individual stakeholders (let’s call them Big Thinkers) often believe their expertise in one discipline – say, physics  – gives them license to work fast to conquer anything, including this whole CMS thing. A common sentiment: “It can’t be rocket science; I should know, I am a rocket scientist!”
• Colleges and universities, in the move to implement, typically don’t spend enough time defining their complex organizational structures and hierarchies and prepare them to work together for web CMS success.

To avoid “Haste makes waste” problems, ask and answer critical questions: Does implementing a new CMS make sense right now? How much work, at what cost, in what timeframe will this all take? How long will we use the CMS? What’s the CMS lifecycle, and how long will it take to reap real benefits?

Further questions to explore: If we already have a CMS, does it make sense to keep our existing CMS or switch to another solution? Are we prepared to assemble an effective evaluation team with the time and fortitude to lead an enlightened product review and selection?

And finally this important question: Do we have sufficient organizational support at the highest levels to get buy in to get the time, money and organizational commitment required to do CMS right?

“Half the truth is often a great lie.”

Ben was a great philosopher. And with those eight words above, he nails one of the most overlooked factors in CMS adoption. Namely: what will the ongoing maintenance costs add up to, and are you ready to support them?

As Yuan pointed out as comparison, making a baby and raising a child are far different. Conducting CMS research, running RFPs and holding vendor interviews and demos help you identify a solution – and the winning vendor will love you for it. But remember to pay attention and factor in all the additional costs associated with buying into a CMS product – and ask your vendor to paint a full and complete picture of the costs. (Far be it from us to cast aspersions on CMS vendors.)

The lesson for you, CMS buyer: Look beyond initial software license costs, for one. That $100K software license for a commercial system will run you about 20% in annual maintenance costs, costing you another $100K over a five year period. Of course, that’s a fraction of what you’ll end up spending when you add up time, agencies, internal resources, upkeep and other expenses.

Other great chestnuts attributed to Franklin and applicable to CMS and the web:

“Distrust and caution are the parents of security.”

The bottom line: DON’T underestimate security requirements for your CMS and web properties. Schools frequently fail to allocate proper security resources, Yuan notes. If anything, go the extra mile during the planning stages to align and allocate the people, process and policies to ensure bulletproof security (especially a college and university culture dominated by independence, diversity of CMS use, dozens or hundreds of authors and a “do it myself” attitude) .

“He that teaches himself hath a fool for a master.”

Translation: Properly address your organization’s training requirements when adopting CMS. Don’t gloss over the needs of your users. Starting out with a new CMS is hard on the people tasked with using it. Software products tend to be geared toward engineers and developers; CMS vendors still have a long way to go to make their products easy to use. Low levels of user satisfaction means low user confidence levels and failure of adoption; robust training can breed familiarity and confidence and overcome some of these problems.

“There are no gains without pains.”

Ben must have had the CMS Myth on his mind when he spoke those words. We like to say CMS is not a silver bullet. No pain, no gain? We agree with that. Organizations need to realize content management is an ongoing process involving people, process and content. CMS can bring a world of positive change, but change is ongoing with CMS. And it can be painful when you introduce a new CMS to the organization.  So be innovative. Rethink your business processes, workflow and rules – embrace the opportunity for change and digital improvement that a CMS can support. Be prepared. Start early and anticipate ongoing needs for maintenance, support and preventative care for your CMS and sites.  And budget for it – now.

Related posts:

1. How many CMS systems in YOUR organization?
2. Should you throw out the CMS or just the implementation?
3. What can three wise web monkeys teach us about CMS?

Chris Bucchere

By Chris Bucchere, Chief Executive Officer, Mojo

Lately I’ve been really overwhelmed by my email inbox. This is not a new problem, but in the past I’ve been able to keep it at under a hundred emails; recently it has grown to nearly 300 and it has really begun to interfere with my getting things done.

So, last night, I took a good, hard look at what was really IN my inbox. About 40% of the notes consisted of links sent to me by well-meaning people who thought I should check them out for various reasons. Another 30% were suggestions on how to make our products, marketing materials, services, etc. better from employees, customers, partners and other well-meaning people. Of the remaining 30%, about half were personal introductions to potential partners, customers, investors or other people with whom the authors thought I would want to connect. The other half were ‘to-do’ items of a business or personal nature, some sent by me to myself (ick!) or by other people.

My email inbox breakdown

I think maybe one or two messages actually consisted of correspondence — by that I mean something like the letters of yesteryear that we used to send through snail mail. It’s interesting to see how the bastardized email of today is so different from the purpose for which it was invented, but that’s the subject of a whole other article. However, while I’m digressing, it’s worth noting that email functions brilliantly as a “better matchbox” than snail mail, but at the same time it performs really poorly at all the other functions that it’s used for today. Email is not a contact management system, a customer relationship management (CRM) system, a link-sharing/social bookmarking tool, nor a support ticketing/issue tracking system. Not by a long shot.

The goal for me was to put all these messages that shouldn’t remain as emails into their proper home so I could deal with them appropriately while maintaining my sanity. Now that I had performed some analytics, it was time to get organized! Here are the tools I used to clean up the mess: Basecamp, Highrise and Instapaper. Instapaper is free; however the 37signals products Basecamp and Highrise carry a small monthly fee.

[Note: They also have trial versions, but don't expect to get too far with them since 37signals made the free versions just useful enough to show you their value without actually providing any.]

Getting from almost 300 emails to under 20 took about two hours and it was time well spent. I made one pass through my bloated inbox and took one of these actions, based on the type of email:

Email Type #1: “Hey, you should check out this link because. . . .”

A simple tool for saving web pages to read later

Opened the link and used the “Read Later” bookmarklet from Instapaper to save the link for when I have to time to read it. If the email containing the link had something interesting in it (besides the link), I copied that into the notes field for that link once I had saved it to Instapaper. If you care to share what you’re reading/bookmarking, you can also use a del.icio.us bookmarklet for this. I find Instapaper easier though, because you can bookmark a link with one click. Del.icio.us forces you to enter tags and other metadata, which increases friction and slows down the process of bookmarking.

Bottom line: Bookmarking, per se, is a simple, rote task that shouldn’t take more than one click to accomplish.

Email Type #2: “Hey, you should make your product better by doing this. . . .”

Pop the most important things out of the backlog and move them into the current release to-do list

Read the email. If there were specific action items associated with it, I created to-dos in Basecamp (under the project for the appropriate product) so that we can address them in a future release. We maintain a to-do list for each release of each product and another to-do list that serves as a backlog for each product. (Some agile tools refer to this as “the icebox.”) When we’re planning a release, we pop the most important things out of the backlog and move them into the current release to-do list.

If the to-dos were general, more thematic suggestions without specific action items associated with them, I copied the suggestions to one of our design writeboards in Basecamp. Then I responded to the email thanking them for the feedback and deleted it.

Bottom line: Product feedback and support tickets belong in Basecamp or a support ticketing system … or even a CRM, but they should never be kept in email as email is not the right tool for tracking the support ticket cycle.

you’re using email as a CRM system, important communiqués are going to slip through the cracks

Email Type #3: “Hey, you should sell to (or partner with) so-and-so. . . ”

Forward the email to Highrise’s email dropbox. Delete. Done. When I process my Highrise queue of messages, I can decide whether or not to pursue these leads on a case-by-case basis. Sales leads belong in your CRM system so that they can be tracked and managed. Email is the wrong tool for tracking the sales cycle. If you want to close sales deals and you’re using email as your CRM system, important communiqués are going to slip through the cracks and you’re going to lose business as a result.

Bottom line: E = mc2 but Email != CRM.








Email Type #4: “Hey, Chris, meet so-and-so. Hey, so-and-so, meet Chris”

Reply All and start the process of scheduling a good time to talk. However, there’s a bit of a hole in this, because if I then delete the message, how do I ensure that so-and-so and I actually end up talking/meeting? If you have any suggestions about how you’ve solved this problem and what tools you’ve used (besides stinkin’ email), please let me know in the comments field associated with this blog post. I guess I could use our CRM for this, but that’s kind of like using a bazooka to kill flies.

Bottom line: I don’t know what the best tool for this is, but I do know that it’s most definitely not email.

Email Type #5: To-do item (not related to a product or a lead)

Put in on my to-do list. Right now, somewhat ironically, this is an email that I keep perpetually in draft status. To-do lists are a funny thing. I’ve used Remember the Milk, Google Spreadsheets/Documents and a number of other tools, but frankly, nothing beats a text file. By keeping it as a draft email in Gmail, I always have access to it from anywhere, buy you can easily accomplish this with Google Docs too, or a number of other tools.

Bottom line: Your inbox should not be your to-do list. Use a text document, a to-do management tool or even a piece of paper and a pen. There’s something inherently gratifying about the physical, visceral action of scratching something off my to-do list with a big, fat marker (preferably a Sharpie). No tool I have encountered can come close to emulating that feeling of accomplishment.

Email Type #6: Personal Correspondence

Print it on nice paper, frame it and hang it on the wall! Seriously, these have gotten so rare, that I really don’t mind them at all.

Bottom line: This is what email was designed to do, so feel free to use it for that. Enjoy it, because your friends would probably rather update their Facebook status than send you an email. If they do send you emails (and there’s no to-do/action-item associated with them), then they’re a true friend. You should return the favor with a personal email of your own, or, if you really want to surprise them, drop a handwritten note to them in the postal mail, preferably with a designer stamp that reflects your sense of style. There’s something really sexy about being retrosexual — try it, I guarantee you’ll get great results!

Conclusion: I didn’t quite reach Inbox Zero before my head hit the keyboard, but I am down to under 20 emails in my Inbox. Every time I hit “delete” I could feel my stress level, my blood pressure and my state of disorganization decreasing proportionately.

So, how many messages are in your inbox? What do you think of my approach? What tools and strategies do you use to manage all this email insanity? I love to hear your comments. Just don’t email them to me!

About the Author Chris Bucchere is CEO of Mojo — a game where fans compete to unlock badges and earn point awards on their favorite websites. Currently a Dogpatch Labs resident entrepreneur, Chris has lived in San Francisco since 1981.