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May 8, 2007
HP's Guidance Error, and Why Email Needs to be Smarter
Nice to see that people other than me now and then screw up cc-lists on emails. In the latest example, HP apparently cc-ed someone external that it shouldn't have on an internal email, thus forcing it to send revised sales/earnings guidance everywhere.The decision to issue updated guidance follows the inadvertent disclosure of financial information relating to HP's recently completed second fiscal quarter through an internal email sent Monday evening to a single outside party. The company determined that the most prudent course of action under these unusual circumstances was to publicly release updated revenue and earnings guidance for that quarter prior to the market's open Tuesday.More broadly, shouldn't this be a feature of smarter email software? I have a Greasemonkey hack that bugs me if it looks like I meant to include an attachment and forgot it, but shouldn't email programs be smarter andask me if, say, the preponderance of people are inside my company, but a small number of outsiders have slipped in?
I'm sure there are other ways of making email smarter. Ideas?
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software that bugs me more? yea that's exactly what i need.
Paul, this is exactly why we created Approver.com.
With Approver, you first create or upload a document then invite users to review it. They receive email alerts (as well as RSS, etc.) to tell them they have a document to review. As the document owner you receive alerts when they review the document, comment on it, and (at your option) approve it.
In this case Approver would have helped in two ways:
1) If you accidentally invite the wrong people you can retract the invitation, preventing them from viewing your document.
2) It's not possible to send someone an email without an attached document when you use Approver, since with Approver you create or upload the document first, then invite people to review it.
For very sensitive documents we also support the notion of linking back to a document stored on your intranet. But at the end of the day what we're providing is a more secure, more manageable alternative to the email attachment.
Email would be a whole lot smarter if PEOPLE weren't writing it :)
I don't understand how, if part of your job is protecting company secrets, you're not doing your job. In the days of pneumatic tubes, you had to make sure to send stuff to the right place. Hello? Don't you check who you're sending email to? Or were you just poking documents into random tubes back in the day?
Every enterprise email software solution lets you create mailing lists that can be accessed by everyone in the department. Shouldn't accounting have a mailing list just for this sort of thing that someone keeps updated on the server?
And, of course, the user actually has to check who he put in the To, CC, and BCC boxes. But you're an accountant. You should be used to getting the details right. It's your job. Computers just do exactly what you tell them to (except when they crash).
And adding another dialog and more buttons to press just means it would take that exact same person three clicks to screw up in a way that they can do with one now. So your level of "screw-up" productivity drops by 66% :)
Seven things I'd fight for if I was a product manager for an email client.
1. I organize my incoming email into a folder structure. I would love for the software to use word frequency or similar technique to begin predicting where I would like it to go. Each time I manually move one would be training for the algorithm.
2. I would love a "send at" option for emails. Where you can set the time for the email to go out. You could use this to send reminders closer to an event.
3. Sometimes the email at work is moving pretty quickly. I would love a feature that warned me, unobtrusively, while I was typing a reply, if someone else has sent a reply.
4. I would love an email folder I could drop stuff in to ping me again in an hour, or a day, kind of like the GTD Tickler.
5. Statistics. I'd love to see who is sending me the most mail, when am I getting it. What topics get the most play. This would be great input to my communication plans. Maybe I need a weekly meeting to deal with certain issues.
6. Give me tags. Adding meta data to emails would let us inform our recipient and their software of how to deal with the emails. I could tag an email as Decision or TeamX.
7. Smart teams. Outlook can predict recipients as I type, from my address book, but it would be cool for it to predict the rest of the list based on the frequency with which I email particular groups of people.
Paul, this post inspired me to write a post that I've been meaning to write for a while:
http://blog.agrawals.org/2007/05/10/the-dumbest-application-you-cant-live-without/
I want my email application to understand context. I want it to automagically sort through the hundreds of messages I get in a day and take care of them. Filters and then some. If I get email that has time/date information in it, I want that processed.
BTW, the latest version of AOL's mail suite has the attachment nag built in. Ran into that this morning.
@5 Michael- Gmail has #3 on your list.
More to the point, shouldn't that be something that you post on the intranet? There are huge costs to doing this by email, as we end up with thousands of copies of the same document, and people each maintaining their own organizing system (folders, tags, etc).
In some organizations, IT even insists on enforcing email quotas, resulting in people costing $100/hr trying to save pennies on hard drive storage.
Oh, and teaching most execs proper email etiquette is hopeless, as is hoping that we someday won't make mistakes. No software is going to help with that.