Kishore Balakrishnan’s Blog

Kevin Fox of Gmail & FriendFeed on User Experience Design

Could you [Kevin Fox] give a four word comment on… Paul Buchheit?
“Email isn’t solved yet”

[Ignore This] Assumption: Company Email address should be used _only_ for business use. [Why Ignore? Read Freewheeling about work-life balance]

What If
1) All my in and out emails can be seen by my manager, my manager’s manager until the Chairman ?

2) Every email that I send and receive goes through a ticketing system i.e., if it is a new email - subject will be prefixed with a ticket number and/or the details added to a company-wide ticketing system.

At any time.. I should be able to
1) close the tickets
2) mark the ticket as public which should send email to all involved to agree to this status !
3) rank open tickets and even closed -> to let my colleagues know of my top pains and tips

Triggers:
1) Andrew McAfee: What I Said About the Revolution
2) Help Reinvent Management for the 21st Century

Jolt Awards Categories 3. Collaboration Tools: Includes groupware that facilitates communication and sharing of information (internally and externally) to increase organizational efficiency, individual accountability, and managerial effectiveness. This category does not include tools that actually produce code and system artifacts.

Triggers:
1. We need a social software inbox
2. Social Software Inbox

We have conversations everywhere.. But there _seems_ to be no way to make our network (leads, colleagues) know our important/urgent “open” conversations

When this is possible.. people will start flocking to the software that makes it most easy for users to bubble up their conversations..

I start a conversation because I have a question or an idea..

Why not 1box?

Can you guess why it is 1box ?

trigger for the post: No ownership, no accountability - wikis, collaboration software, social media, Enterprise 2.0 and how not to get things done.

1. Business is a value chain, a social value chain with a clear purpose.
2. I am a part of a value chain and will have to do my part. For that I need ownership to what I’m supposed to do. Either I do it or somebody else does it.
3. We all need accountability, if somebody else is dependent on what I’m supposed to do I better get down to it. And vice versa.

&

Thinking about collaboration

Collaboration takes place when you do what you are good at, and when you let other people do what they are good at.

mmm.. It looks like we still have no software in the enterprise to make the people accountable

What features do we need?
1. When I have a problem to solve, I will create an item which will consist of a short-text, details, (attachment!?), tags, people-who-i-think-can-help-me
2. Now some one in the list of people-who-i-think-can-help-me could either help me, give a clue, and/or add more people-who-they-think-can-help-me
3. repeat step 2 until problem is solved !

Other features:
4. Whenever I have a new problem, I should rank the new problem relative to the list of existing issues so that the people-who-i-think-can-help-me know my priorities
5. Users should be able to change their relationship to items from “i can and am trying to help” to “i cannot help but interested in the outcome” - Now the software should let people get updates depending on this relationship like “update on every change: new clue/memo/hint or new people” or “update weekly” or “update at the end of closure” etc
6. let answers be rated i.e., thank users for the clues/hints..
7. ..thinking..

Is there any software that has the above features ?

(NextBestAction is something am working on with the above requirements in mind)

note: PLM is usually Product Life Cycle Management

can also be Problem Life Cycle Management