An interview with Josh Jacobs, President of X1 Technologies, on how he handles 'Email Triage' and examples of ways that X1 users are using search to more effectively use Email.
MP3 File
Complete Transcription Follows:
Dan Keldsen: This is, once again, Dan Keldsen from the Delphi Group in Boston which is www.DelphiGroup.com. Today I'm speaking with Josh Jacobs who is the President of X1 Technologies. You can find out more about them at www.X1.com.
Today we will be speaking about "More is More, the End of E-mail Triage" and about how Josh is using X1's own technology in managing what could be the mayhem of e-mail. Also perhaps some case studies around how their customers are using this in a broader context but we'll see where we get.
So if we could kick it off Josh, first of all thanks for your time. Who is X1? What do you do? Let's explain it to people a little bit before we dive into how you are using it specifically.
Josh Jacobs: Excellent. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Let me start by talking about what X1 does. X1 is an enterprise desktop search company.
I know a lot of folks have certainly heard of desktop search and talked about desktop search over the last couple of years. We were one of the pioneers in this space. The company was actually started in 2002 but over the last couple of years this desktop search has become more and more mainstream.
We really made an emphasis on focusing on the benefits of desktop search in the workplace. What that's meant for us has been initially a focus around building tools for IT departments to be able to deploy the technology and then extending desktop search on the richer interfaces that are generally possible there into other types of enterprise data.
So today X1 provides secure desktop search tools for corporations but also has a whole platform of technologies that allow you to incorporate information from content management systems, file servers, share data on exchange servers and integrate all of that information together with the personal information that people are managing on their desktops in a single search interface.
Dan: Okay, great. Desktop search is certainly something that we've been covering as part of a big, old enterprise search space. A lot of people think they might have desktop search, but not to the extent that you're handling things.
If we could dive into the title of our session here, More is More, the end of Email Triage. The last time we talked you gave a hint as to how you are using your own technology to manage your e-mail. I'm hoping we can walk through that today.
Josh: Absolutely. I think most people who have a lot of e-mail messages today have gone through a fairly similar progression around e-mail. They first started getting it and they got a few messages. Maybe they checked e-mail once or twice a day. It was exciting. Everything fit in your inbox because you weren't getting that many e-mails.
Then as e-mail became more and more popular, the next step that people started taking is they started creating a light weight taxonomy and folders for storing stuff, either that they needed to come back to later or things that they were filing for reference. But the cost of that was fairly limited because we were still talking about a fairly low message volume.
Dan: Right.
Josh: I think increasingly then what happens is that you start to hear people bragging about their e-mail coping mechanisms. You start hearing people say, "Oh, I delete everything before I go home everyday," or, "I read messages and I instantly delete them."
All of these mechanisms, triage mechanisms, coping mechanisms, deleting mechanisms, all sort of stem from the fact that as e-mail has become more and more popular the statistics that we've seen show that people are spending close to two hours a day just managing their mailbox.
Certainly in my case, I have about 300,000 messages on my machine that I manage. I get somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple hundred per day. The idea of yeah, I just drag in a couple of things and I delete a couple of things, it starts to become overwhelming. It becomes a dominate activity in people's lives.
Dan: Right.
Josh: The thing that people miss when they move to that triage step and when they start deleting stuff is that there is a thought process that is involved with deleting information and with that two hours a day that they are spending which is that when you look at every piece of mail that comes in you are essentially making a determination at that point.
Am I going to need this at some point in the future? How important is this thing to me? You may or may not ever in fact come to realize that future value but you have to make that decision up front.
You make that decision by deciding I'm going to delete it. I'm never going to use this information again. I'm going to drag this into this folder or in more complicated environments literally submitting it through a work flow to a records management system.
Dan: Right.
Josh: All of these things are about determining how important is this information? Will it ever be important in the future? So the challenge with that obviously is that you incur all of the cost in terms of time up front. You may never in fact get that time back in savings because you may never end up referring to that piece of information again.
Dan: Sure or finding it anyhow.
Josh: Exactly. The alternative approach and the one that I've certainly moved to in my own world which is this sort of More is More approach is a system where you don't worry about organizing stuff. You read your e-mail when it comes in.
I have effectively two folders. I have a small folder full of things that actually require me to spend significant time on. That is kind of my To Do list.
I have a much bigger folder which has tens of thousands of messages in it and on a periodic basis gets swept into a PST archives because the Outlook inbox can only get so big.
Dan: Sure.
Josh: The difference here is that I never worry because disk space is cheap. I don't worry so much about hey, is this going to be important to me or not? I don't really know and I don't really care because I don't spend any time organizing.
With instantaneous search I have the ability to bring up totally random things like that e-mail that I got from a friend two years ago with his new work e-mail when he changed jobs. That's an obvious thing to delete and only became valuable when I thought, "Gosh, he worked on a project like that. He might be a guy for me to talk to."
So the idea behind More is More is that it doesn't cost you anything to have more information on your machine and it doesn't penalize you when it comes time to find something that's important to you. Then all of the sudden you have the ability to start opting into more and more data being on your machine because you can use it in powerful ways.
I'll give you two examples of that that I've personally done since moving to using a desktop search system. The first is I use an RSS aggregator that puts all of the posts from the blogs that I subscribe to into my inbox as e-mail messages.
Dan: Right.
Josh: That's incredibly powerful to me because what it allows me to do is to walk around with a database of high value content from people who I trust, trusted sources of information on topic areas that matter to me. I have instant recall ability across just those blogs that I've subscribed to whether I'm connected to the Internet or not. It's all there in my inbox.
I do the same thing with all of our customer support messages. I get those things in my inbox and I may read them. I may not. They just go into the overall mob.
If I'm going into a meeting with a customer I can immediately type in that customer name. I can see any recent interaction they've had with the company so I don't get surprised walking in there. If there is an open trouble ticket I can know about it. That's a perfect example of a piece of information that has no value to me at the time that it gets received because it's not my job to respond to those messages.
But at the moment that I put something on my calendar that says: You're going to go meet with that person, that becomes the most important piece of information in my entire inbox.
Dan: Sure. Okay. When are you doing these searches? Are you doing them on the fly as you need them or do you have constantly running searches?
Josh: I do them on the fly as I need them because what the desktop search product does is it keeps all of the information indexed and up to date. X1 provides a feature actually called Real Time Indexing that literally keeps my index up to the second accurate. As e-mail gets received it's added to my search database.
So, I use Outlook for reading messages when they come in but I use the search tool for all of my organization instead. The other thing that I think ends up troubling people with these taxonomies is more often that not you find that their may be more than one logical place for a piece of information.
Dan: Right.
Josh: Single level structure taxonomies don't provide great mechanisms for saying, "This is not only a customer issue but it's also a proposal and it's also for Client X." You have to pick one of those three folders to put that into.
So you have to be very, very good about deciding what are the rules that I'm going to use in organizing stuff? Then you have to stick with that forever because going back and reclassifying a year's worth of e-mail is impossible.
Dan: Yeah.
Josh: Search lets you say never mind to all of that. At any given time if I want to look for proposals on my machine it doesn't really matter how they are organized. I can look for the word proposal and I can find everything that I need. I can organize it as proposals at that moment and close the structure on it.
Five minutes later if I want to see everything that I sent to Client XYZ I can impose a client oriented structure on my machine in the exact same way. So, search is very, very powerful in that it allows for dynamic contextual organization of information as opposed to pre-structured taxonomy driven organization.
Dan: Okay. That's interesting. Now for the archived mail that you've put into PST's, do you also search that or is that just in case you need it?
Josh: Actually one of the features of X1 is that it can load as many unmounted Outlook PST's as you want and add all of those into your index. It is transparent to use so you're not searching at different places if you don't want to. I think I have three and a half years of e-mail stored on my machine, almost all of them in PST's.
It's transparent to me as a user whether that's in my inbox, whether that's in a PST, whether it's in a public folder. Anything that's an e-mail message on my machine is just available to me.
The same thing applies to attachments that I have in files. I have files that are on my disk. I have attachments that are part of e-mail messages. I have resumes that have been attached to calendar invites that are in my calendar. Some of those things are now in PST's. Some of those things are still in my OST within Outlook.
If I want to go find a data sheet, I don't need to ask the questions, "Did somebody send me that? Did I remember to save it to disk? Did I put it in this folder? Is it in two year's ago's PST file?" I just search for the document and I find it transparently wherever it is.
That's the same thing that we bring to the larger enterprise story which is this idea that the individual worker doesn't really care about what the system is that it's stored in or what format it's stored in. They just want all of the information that they have access to at their fingertips.
Making that as transparent as possible makes it really easy in environments where you have a content management system and a shared folders file server and you have e-mail and you have public folders. The more complex and the more storage facilities you create the tougher it becomes for people to even know where is something, three different interfaces to do a search.
Dan: This sort of echoes the issues that we see with our own clients as well. Inevitably when we go into an organization and try to help them with a search strategy they don't lack for search. They have search all over the place. They just don't have good search at any one place and certainly not good search across even just the desktop.
We keep joking that we've never really seen full fledged enterprise search because there are always systems that are not part of that search crowd. So, for all of the money that people have invested there are still these ions of information that you just can't get there from here.
Maybe you need to go through a taxonomy to get to that and there is a search where you can search all of the other information that may or may not be the high value stuff that you're looking for.
Josh: I think the other really interesting thing that I mentioned at the beginning is that e-mail usage has increased but the other thing that's really happened is that as e-mail has become more and more popular it is actually not just an island. It's not part of the enterprise search anymore. It's actually become some of the most critical data in the organization and the least managed and unsearchable.
We have great stuff that shows that two thirds of American companies today will except an e-mail from a customer as a purchase confirmation. That turns it into a business record that is transactional data. It's not just a lunch invitation anymore.
Dan: Right.
Josh: Me running around with 300,000 e-mails on my machine, I may in fact have the most critical data here. The stuff that's on the file server and the content management system is a very, very small subset of the actual data in the organization. The stuff out at the edge is changing constantly because we're getting hundreds of new messages for every single employee every single day.
Dan: Sure.
Josh: Absolutely, our whole view of enterprise search is that it begins at the desktop because it starts with the highest volatility information that is probably the most accurate data in terms of the state of business that needs to extend into the archived information and shared information. That stuff needs to be part of it as well.
Dan: Sure, so the content management, records management systems, that's where content goes to die after it has served its use.
Josh: Well, maybe. I think that is certainly one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it is there are collaborative systems and that e-mailing back and forth with a customer that I'm negotiating a contract with, the stuff that's in my inbox is by far the most relevant and highest value data.
But as that contract gets completed and goes into a records management system it becomes incredibly important piece of information for the finance department for example that didn't care about it when it was just a red line going back and forth between me and the attorneys.
So it's not just a question of dying but that all of these systems have different roles in the organization. To have a comprehensive ability to manage information you need to touch all of them but you need to do it in the perspective of who needs this data?
Who has permission to see this data? What is going to be the most relevant to the data to the different types of activities that they are engaged in?
Dan: Right. The other side is that I've heard and I forget who might have coined this. It doesn't matter. Of course some people say that e-mail is where knowledge or content goes to die too because of the sheer volume and the problems of foldering and all of that as well.
The more technology we get, as people still apply them in inappropriate ways, it doesn't really matter what they are doing to solve the problems if it's just an obtuse way of applying a particular piece of solution to a problem.
Josh: I think that's right.
Dan: Also another aspect that I've been banging the drum on this in my endeavors in information security and just in general because I've been kind of following usability for a fair number of years. The idea of transparency is something that is a somewhat over used term and probably abused, but in all seriousness most people should not have to care all that much about where does the content live.
They just want to get to it so they can do their job. They don't want to have to search. Again, they might have ten different search options and one is just for e-mail and one is just for the files on their machine and one is just for the file server and one is just for content management system.
Another is for their Internet and even though many people want to ignore the cost, time is money except when it isn't because we don't recognize the soft cost of time saved. If you have ten search options but you literally have to search in ten different places, nobody does that unless you they really have to. It's just beating your employees to death basically.
You want it searched? Here you go. How many options do you want? They don't want that. They don't want search. They want find.
Josh: I'll tell you a funny story. I've used this quote before because a customer of mine called up and we were having a conversation about how they were using X1. He described this situation where he is a sales person and he got a phone call from one of his customers complaining about an invoice and disputing the amount in the invoice.
Our guy sent a bill for $10,000. The customer says we had agreed to $5,000. I need to track down what happened. So he gets off the phone with his customer and he uses X1 to search through his e-mail and see had he ever shot the guy and e-mail saying it would be $5,000 or $10,000, trying to create a paper trail history.
But he uses Sales Force for all of his account activity so he logs into Sales Force and he brings up the whole account history there. He's reading through all of the annotations that he's made on the account to see if he ever had a phone conversation with the guy where he had verbalized the thing.
Dan: Right.
Josh: Then he has to go into their content management system where they keep all of their finished contracts. He has to go search through that to find the contracts and look at what the customer signed up for.
Dan: Right.
Josh: The way he described it to me he spent all his time searching, not selling.
Dan: Oh, yeah.
Josh: It gets back to your point exactly of what is the value of that time? If that guy had that 30 minutes that it took him to answer the customers question, if he could have answered it while he was on the phone with the customer what could he have done with the other 29 minutes of his day? He would have been more free to be productive with the business.
Dan: Right.
Josh: The answer to this, certainly as we see, is consistency over and over again. You can simplify. Transparency is a good word. Virtualization is a good word. Anything that you can do so that the knowledge workers themselves don't have to be consumed with, where does information live?
Which application am I supposed to use to locate this or to manage this? You can make that transparent. They will be more productive.
IT certainly has to think about what goes where and what are the rules around this stuff and what back up and retention policies do we have, but those things don't have to become barriers to productivity with those workers.
Dan: Right. Then all of those workers and the business managers and the executives, none of them should really have to worry about the low level of details there on who and how is security implemented and what systems are touched very explicitly. I'm shouldn't have to know if I'm using XML or God knows what in my systems.
Very frequently, if they are non technical, people get dragged down into that, and then the technical people don't (very often anyhow) penetrate the barrier in the opposite direction to get to it. Rather than, "This is what they told me they wanted so that's what I did."
If people have no idea what's even possible then they don't really know what they are looking for. The IT folks may be not quite serving the internal customers as well as they could.
Josh: To be fair, at the same time, all of this that we've been talking about with all of the information at the edge, the thing that we have to remember as well is that the IT guys for the last five or six years have been under an unbelievable amount of pressure with new regulations like SarBox and HIPAA and the rest.
They are being told, "You've got to lock this stuff down. You've got to keep three years of e-mails around. You've got to be able to produce a message on a moments notice in response to litigation."
All of the sudden you've spent the last ten years as an IT organization pushing productivity and power out to the edge of your network. Now you're being told that is your biggest liability.
So there is a fair amount of criticism coming into play around what is it that you're doing to make it easier for knowledge workers. There is also one of the things that you have to look at certainly as a vendor in this space is how are we making it easier for IT to not only deliver on their mission of getting great information to their workers but at the same time doing it in a post SarBox environment where they've got a whole bunch of new requirements as well.
Dan: Right. I'm not saying that business people or IT people are evil but in general that there needs to be some meeting of the minds so that we can actually get to a world where it's more possible for people to hyper focus on just their side of the pond.
Federated Search for example is only still a relatively new concept and not necessarily implemented all that well from a variety of solution providers. Until that happens then I think we're still going to run into these situations where search in particular gets kind of way too focused on, "Well you said you wanted e-mail search or you said you wanted search on the internet and that's what you got."
Josh: Right.
Dan: Oh, you just wanted search in general and the first application of that is in this area.
Josh: Yeah, it's funny that our experience shows that in spades. It's part of the reason that we made our desktop search product free was that consistently in our experience what happens is e-mail is an area where people are feeling a tremendous amount of pain. When they all of the sudden start getting this time back in their day and they start being able to instantly find anything in there they start asking the question, "How come I can't do this with the other information behind our firewall?"
Bill Gates had this great quote back in 2004 where he was talking about search inside the corporate environment. He said, "It's easier to find something on the Web than it is on our own PC's." What he was speaking to was this frustration in a post Google kind of world where search had all of the sudden become something that was mainstream and that people understood how to use.
The minute they got comfortable using it on the internet they were turning around and looking for it in all of these other places in their lives. They were saying, "Wait a minute. If Google can organize everything out here, how come my IT department can't even help us find the benefits enrollment form easily here at work?"
I think that really gave rise to this whole new wave around search because our users all understand it and have expectations around it now. The more that we raise those expectations with their personal lives, with their personal information, the more that they expect that stuff to be prevalent in all of their corporate information.
Dan: Right. It's definitely an interesting time now. I'm like everybody else - I use Google on the public Web. It has certainly made people a lot more aware that it is actually possible to use search. My fear, and what I've seen play out when we've done educational events or when we're doing onsite consulting is that people still have no real idea of what it takes to make search really honed to an enterprise situation, and we need to get them to understand that access to 20 different systems in your organization is not quite as easy as crawling Web sites.
So, it's a ‘What's involved in that and why is it more complicated?' scenario. It's gotten to the point that people are starting to realize what the problem is and they are getting fed up with not having appropriate solutions inside. That's driving search from all sorts of angles. I think it's an interesting time for search right now.
Josh: Absolutely. We believe actually that it is fairly early stages of a whole new sort of interface revolution around search right now. When you look around you're seeing, whether it's Apple and what they did with Spotlight or the new stuff that's coming in Vista, that we are starting to see search go from being that box in the upper right hand corner of the screen that's kind of the after thought or the last resort kind of interface, to becoming a peer of taxonomies in things like the Finder and the Windows Explorer Shell, eventually actually moving to the fore front and becoming the primary interface metaphor for looking at information.
I don't think that taxonomies go away in that model at all. I think we're seeing more and more that as users are comfortable using search it opens up opportunities in interface design to think much more creatively about how do we let these users interact richly with huge amounts of information that are far greater than what they can personally drag into folders and classify themselves.
Dan: Right. I don't know that folders are going to go away anytime soon but as we start to have these capabilities where you can have virtual folders or smart folders or whatever terminology you want to use and obviously the search that you can run on the fly it does open up new possibilities. It's just are the humans using it adaptable enough to make that jump to the next generation?
Josh: I think that the answer to that is obviously that software space comes from innovation from both start ups and the main vendors. What Microsoft I think is going to do with this is certainly to introduce people to the concept of what you call them Smart folders or you call them Tag driven collections, or whatever you want to call them.
They are going to popularize that notion and really help people get comfortable with the idea that physical location in a path isn't necessarily the only place that something can exist, that it can have a conceptual location as well as a physical location. I think that's great because what that does is it raises the bar for everybody else in terms of what assumptions we can make about a user's skill and comfort level and we can build on that.
Dan: Right.
Josh: Just the same way that Windows 95 and Macintosh taught people to use menus and dial up boxes and that allowed us to do a bunch of interesting stuff with interface, getting people more and more used to using search as their primary way of looking for information opens a ton of new doors as well.
Dan: Right. Cool! We spent a fair amount of time today talking about this and I know we both have fairly busy schedules here. I think we'll wrap it up at this. Thanks very much for helping to illustrate how you and your clients are using search in innovative ways, the new way anyhow of dealing with search and e-mail and all of the info glut that we have. I hope we can talk again soon.
Josh: Excellent. I really appreciate the time today and the chance to participate. I would encourage people to visit www.X1.com and try out some of our products.
Dan: Thanks very much. This is once again, Dan Keldsen from the Delphi Group in Boston. You can find us at www.DelphiGroup.com and I was speaking with Josh Jacobs who is President of X1 Technologies. As was said previously you can find them at www.X1.com.
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