I have previously touched on how poor email filing discipline ie filing or storing emails, can cost an organisation money, increase the company’s risk or increase customers frustration because their information cannot be found quickly. It can also make a colleagues job a lot harder and more frustrating, wasting time trying to find information that has not been stored in a specific customer, project or supplier file.

Whilst having experienced these problems ‘first hand’ in several of my CIO roles, it’s something which can be difficult to solve because it involves changing staff/peoples working behaviour. Change can be complex and difficult and I have to admit I didn’t always get it right!

When I think about my past experience of colleagues email filing discipline, some of my business colleagues were diligent in filing their business related emails but many were not. This is perhaps not wholly surprising, after all, there is always more interesting work to be getting on with.

One way I found to help solve this difficult problem is through the use of automation. This could be either through the use of automatic filing or by presenting a small number of filing options to users at the point they read their emails. I have now had extensive experience of working with professional services organisations and addressed the objections raised to such an approach. There is initially either a fear they will lose control or non-business related emails will be stored with the business related emails.

Getting the balance right between supporting the organisation and supporting the staff needs is important which is something we at Knowledgemill take extremely seriously. Our intelligent machine learning email filing system can be set-up to support different business departments or even individual members of staff in different ways while still meeting the business objective of creating a central store of email correspondence that can be used to support customers, suppliers and projects.

Knowledgemill works seamlessly as part of Microsoft Outlook (Office 365 or Exchange) and integrates with the document management system of your choice or the native Knowledgemill DMS.  It also provides a full filing capability for iPhones, iPads and Android phones.

At Knowledgemill we have been working with many organisations to solve their operational email management problems, Legal firms, construction firms, accounting firms or professional services organisations. Click on the link www.knowledgemill.com to find out more.  We would be pleased to demonstrate/discuss how Knowledgemill works with your existing systems and how it could help your organisation.

I have in the past, as many businesses, employed expensive consultants to perform an assessment of the Company’s ‘day to day’ operational processes, The consultants brief is to document the existing processes and look for areas that can be automated or improved. They generally produce very comprehensive documentation with detailed cost benefit for each improvement, business KPIs and role definitions. However, the one area that appears neglected is email management which could provide huge improvements to the business. 

Email is a critical business communication tool. It is imperative for customer service, supplier management and may become a business risk/cost if not managed effectively. Each member of staff will spend a lot of their working day managing emails, sending emails, replying to emails and referring to historic emails as a core part of their job. If the email management burden on staff can be reduced it can improve productivity significantly.

The majority of business emails contain vital information for the organisation and requires handling with speed and precision to deliver a timely and coherent customer-centric experience. This can be achieved using an intelligent email filing capability which can automatically file the majority of all business emails in the right place without user intervention, providing suggestions for the remainder with the additional capability to find historic emails quickly and easily, irrespective of age and who received the email initially. 

There can be resistance when implementing an email automation. One of the major concerns I encounter when talking to organisations is the fear that Zero click filing results in emails being filed in the wrong place or that staff fear loss of control. The opposite is of course true, by combining automation with machine learning, staff remain in control. Automation removes most of the burden of email administration for the user, saving considerable in filing and searching for business critical emails. Combined with a data retention policy, it reduces compliance, audit and data regulation risk for the organisation and promotes a consistent customer-centric model. 

Read the feedback below from one of our many satisfied clients (in their own words) after they implemented Knowledgemill Mail Manager in their business:

Working more effectively as a team – “the whole team use the same work folders (Client, supplier or project), so everyone is completely up-to-date at all times, without ever having to copy or forward to colleagues. ‘Very simply, we send and receive at least 30% less mail’.”

Impressing clients by always being well informed – whether it’s taking a query for a colleague or providing relationship continuity over holidays or staff changes, every member of the team can see the latest communication thread.

Saving time and effort – Automated filing has cut down the need for people to spend time filing emails. Better still, it dramatically reduces the time spent looking for emails or asking colleagues for information or forwarding and cc’ing – every email from every one and every attachment to a particular case is gathered together in a folder in Outlook, which is easy to scan by eye or search and filter.

Maintaining complete records – There is now a comprehensive record of all electronic communication, classified and stored by client and project. This is great for regulatory compliance, internal process compliance, management overview and client confidence. 

Simplicity of adoption – introducing 100% compulsory filing and a management information system would normally be pretty traumatic. But because Knowledgemill works intuitively just like a part of Outlook, and because filing is mostly automatic, users have no problem learning to use it and there is little cultural change.

Knowledgemill Mail Manager automates the complex process of filing and simplifies searching for emails, attachments and documents across your entire organisation by securely storing all data into one central database. Relax in the knowledge that you will never lose an email or document again, saving valuable time with instant access to all important and relevant data at the click of a button anywhere and at any time.

Here at Knowledgemill, we have the know how and experience to help with email management for your organisation. Visit www.knowledgemill.com or contact us at info@knowledgemill.com for an informal chat and see how Knowledgemill can help your business get your email management under control.

Moving to Microsoft 365 can be a complex challenge. There is countless advice available on how to plan and execute a move technically but very little to explain how to clean up your email stores (Inboxes, PST’s, Public Folders, etc.) to ensure your users get the best possible user experience after the move to Microsoft 365 and that you keep control of the ongoing associated cost of storage. Scattered and unstructured data significantly increases the likelihood of increasing the email management cost when moving to Microsoft 365.

Typically email is distributed in a large number of email silos which can include user Inboxes, departments emails stores, PST files, old email from staff who have left, Public Folders, etc. In addition, user inboxes can dramatically differ is size and structure particularly when using Outlook Folders. If an email management problem is migrated to 365 it will only become a bigger problem with increased costs.

At a high level the transition can be broken into a number of different areas:

• Planning the best approach for your organisation  – probably the most important stage of the project
• Removing email duplication – this can save a huge amount of space and therefore cost
• Deleting unnecessary emails from users inboxes and other email data stores – the challenge here is agreeing an approach with the business users which can include changing the mindset of keeping everything ‘just in case’
• Creating a well-organised central email database – this will make the move to 365 as trouble-free as possible.

Knowledgemill provides an intelligent machine learning email filing system that works seamlessly as part of Office 365 or on premise Exchange and will make your move to Microsoft 365 as effortless as possible. It can be used to create a single set of email data that is ready to move to Microsoft 365 by ingesting all emails from current sources, remove duplication, deleting unwanted emails automatically based on your organisation’s data policies and ensuring all company data retention and security rules are respected.

At Knowledgemill we have been working with many organisations to solve their operational email management problems, Legal firms, construction firms, accounting firms or professional services organisations. Please click on the link www.knowledgemill.com to find out more.  I would be pleased to demonstrate/discuss how Knowledgemill can help your business, explain the system in more detail and show how Knowledgemill could help your organisation. 

Kevin has been successfully delivering technology solutions to companies for over 30 years both on the buying and selling side of a number of blue chip organisations, e.g. with Deloitte or as a CIO/COO.

Outlook Public Folders are an outdated and underpowered tool that may cause a number of organisational challenges and poor performance when moving to Office 365 or as the number of users increases. With only manual filing available there is sole dependency on the diligence / compliance of the individual users filing every email. Rather than saving time, time is wasted as it is more difficult to find information and with no de-duplication or compression of emails there is no saving on storage space. 

A further major challenge which cannot be solved by Public Folders is the need for emails and documents to be available in real-time to support each area of the organisation. The information embedded in emails and documents needs to be at hand to support the business Sales, Customer Service, Risk, Compliance, suppliers, etc. This is not fully possible when using Public Folders.

Knowledgemill provides an intelligent machine learning email filing system that works seamlessly as part of Microsoft Outlook (Office 365 or Exchange) and integrates with the document management system of your choice or the native Knowledgemill DMS.  It also provides a full filing capability for iPhones, iPads and Android phones and provides a well proven migration path from Public Folders to Knowledgemill. Knowledgemill can also be used to provide one quick single powerful search across emails and documents.

At Knowledgemill we have been working with many organisations to solve their operational email management problems, Legal firms, construction firms, accounting firms or professional services organisations. Please click on the link www.knowledgemill.com to find out more.  I would be pleased to demonstrate/discuss how Knowledgemill can help your business, explain the system in more detail and show how Knowledgemill could help your organisation. 

Kevin has been successfully delivering technology solutions to companies for over 30 years both on the buying and selling side of a number of blue chip organisations, e.g. with Deloitte or as a CIO/COO.

Many businesses have a culture of operating in email silos with emails only accessible by one staff member’s Inbox or one department. This email isolation from the rest of the organisation can cause many issues for the organisation.

Working in email silos threatens the accuracy of your data and increases organisational risk. Scattered and unstructured data increases the chance of using out-of-date or incorrect information. An incomplete view of the business in this way can mean management decision-making becomes harder or increases the risk of poor decision-making. Outward facing, it can easily lead to bad client experience because of the difficulty establishing the full picture when communicating with them.

Silo working also slows the pace of the organisation with everything taking longer. It creates a less collaborative environment and it is very hard to find the right information quickly, resulting in an enormous amount of time wasted searching and retrieving information embedded in emails. A lack of up to date technology across the organisation can also prohibit email data passing easily between departments or staff. Companies need high quality applications that can handle quick transfer of information.

Company growth itself can be restrained because of the over complexity of maintaining all the email data silos, together with maintaining those silos when staff leave.  An organisation can end up adding more and more staff to manage the consequence of data silos instead of being able to focus on growing the organisation.   A significant amount of storage space is wasted through duplication this can be as much as 90% wasted email data space.

Adopting Knowledgemill Email Manager can solve all these issues. Knowledgemill removes email silos to create a single centrally managed database of emails. By migrating all emails from all silos (and removing duplications) to the central database this can then be linked to all email Inboxes and kept up-to-date in real time.

Knowledgemill provides an intelligent machine learning email filing system that works seamlessly as part of Microsoft Outlook (Office 365 or Exchange) and integrates with the document management system of your choice or the native Knowledgemill DMS.  It also provides a full filing capability for iPhones, iPads and Android phones.

At Knowledgemill we have been working with many organisations to solve their operational email management problems, Legal firms, construction firms, accounting firms or professional services organisations. Please click on the link www.knowledgemill.com to find out more.  I would be pleased to demonstrate/discuss how Knowledgemill can help your business, explain the system in more detail and show how Knowledgemill could help your organisation. 

Kevin has been successfully delivering technology solutions to companies for over 30 years both on the buying and selling side of a number of blue chip organisations, e.g. with Deloitte or as a CIO/COO.

Let’s be honest, a lack of user discipline when filing or storing emails costs organisations a huge amount of money and can put the company at significant risk. Relying solely on our colleagues to have good email filing discipline, ensuring that all relevant business is filed diligently can have serious repercussions for the company. 

Our colleagues may not invoice our customers fully, or we may waste a lot of time trying to find information embedded in emails, and we could even risk regulatory fines or be unable to defend litigation. A poor email filing discipline or everything stored in individual staff email Inboxes, where you don’t have access to the information, is very frustrating. Consider the following:

• Client Service – with critical data being spread across numerous individual mailboxes, how quickly can you establish the full and most up-to-date position?  This challenge is made even greater when members of staff leave.
• Productivity – have you ever sat down and thought about how much time is wasted trying to search and find emails?
• Risk – having data scattered across multiple mailboxes not only makes it much harder to search and find information but also increases the chances of using out-of-date or incorrect information.
• Staff Morale – with staff being copied in to all emails relating to a particular client or job, whether the email is relevant to them or not, they run the risk of email overload.  Typically they either waste time by having to read every single email or they start skipping emails, leaving them left unopened, which increases the risk of missing something important.
• Data Storage Cost – An email received by 5 people is stored 5 times which then increases storage capacity exponentially.  It also means that mailboxes become quickly cluttered, making it even harder to search and find information.

Machine learning can go a long way to solving the complex problem of email management. It can be used to learn from a user’s email filing behaviour and can prompt the user when it’s not sure where an email should be filed. i.e. automate as much as possible (zero click filing) and use the human brain to do the rest.

Knowledgemill provides an intelligent machine learning email filing system that works seamlessly as part of Microsoft Outlook (Office 365 or Exchange) and integrates with the document management system of your choice or the native Knowledgemill DMS.  It also provides a full filing capability for iPhones, iPads and Android phones.

One question I’m often asked is, how accurate is machine learning? In our experience it can be pushed to 95% but that once you get above 80% you will get some filing errors. You will not be surprised to learn that Knowledgemill files up to 80% of emails automatically to guarantee accuracy.

At Knowledgemill we have been working with many organisations to solve their operational email management problems, Legal firms, construction firms, accounting firms or professional services organisations. Click on the link www.knowledgemill.com to find out more.  We would be pleased to demonstrate/discuss how Knowledgemill works with your existing systems and how it could help your organisation. 

Kevin has been successfully delivering technology solutions to companies for over 30 years both on the buying and selling side of a number of blue chip organisations, e.g. with Deloitte or as a CIO/COO.

It recently struck me that I have now been creating Common Data Environments (CDEs) for over 20 years! Although I must say it has got a whole lot easier over the last few years with the many improvements in technology and the introduction of cloud solutions.

For me a CDE is a central database of documents* and email correspondence that is created as near ‘real time’ as possible. It can be provided to the business user when they need it to do their job, regardless of whether they are in sales, project management, customer service, finance, HR or any other operational business area. 

Of course there are many challenges in creating and maintaining a CDE. It’s imperative to get the technology architecture right and it’s key to elect the right system solutions. You need to ensure the documents and emails can be used by your operation systems ie Salesforce, SharePoint, Open Text, M-files, SAP, and your operational systems/customer support systems. At the same time, the central database of documents, emails and the loosely coupled integration needs to be maintained

Recently, one area I have been finding our customers having to deal with (more and more) is how to maintain a CDE while respecting data residency requirements, i.e. the need to create a hybrid CDE (partly on premise and partly in the cloud). Knowing where your data is, is important. This is particularly critical if the local data laws/data regulation say the data must be retained locally. Many of the large vendors are now making this increasingly more difficult because they want to move everything to cloud to improve the value/share price of their organisations.

At Knowledgemill we have been working with many organisations to create a CDE. If you would like support in creating your hybrid CDE click on the link www.knowledgemill.com to find out more.  I would be pleased to demonstrate/discuss how Knowledgemill can help your business, explain the system in more detail and show how Knowledgemill could help your organisation to create and maintain a CDE in combinations with your existing systems. 

Kevin been successfully delivering technology solutions to companies for over 30 years both on the buying and selling side of a number of blue chip organisations, e.g. with Deloitte or as a CIO/COO.

Working as I did for many years as a CIO, one area I always struggled to get budget support for was helping users and the business manage email correspondence. It’s just not a very sexy area. There are always higher priority areas for a business to spend money on and It is not easy for managers to see how it directly supports a business’s revenue generation, customer support and reduce risk – but of course it does!

Email is intended to streamline communication, but it can become a counter-productive tool when the inbox requires so much time and effort to manage and/or when you need to collaborate with other colleagues to support customers and sales activity. Email can be extremely unwieldy and detrimental to our productivity if we (or the company we are working for) let it. 

In general, there are two key areas to support email management for me as a user; personal email discipline and business email discipline required to support sales, customers and business operations.

Much is written about personal email discipline and how to become more productive. I always find setting aside specific times during the day to read and send emails is a big help to my productivity. However, not so much is written about a company’s email discipline, which is probably more important for your staff.

For me, I can stay calm when facing the daily deluge of emails, because of the central database of emails we maintain. The central database is up-to-date in real time and is organised by customer, supplier, project, etc. making it extremely quick and easy to file and find email information  – much of the filing is automatically done for me.

To create and maintain this central database of emails we use an email management tool called Knowledgemill, this can be plugged into my Outlook or available on a mobile device. It means I am copied in on less emails as they are always available centrally and I can find any information stored in an email very quickly and easily, regardless of the age of the email. 

For the business, it means all staff spend much less time searching and finding emails and find it easy to answer customer questions which is particularly useful when the conversation has been with another member of staff.

If you would like everything relating to your email to be calm and controlled click on the link www.knowledgemill.com to find out more.  I would be pleased to demonstrate/discuss how Knowledgemill can help your business, explain the system in more detail and show how Knowledgemill could help your organisation. 

Working as a CIO, one of the challenges I frequently experienced was implementing document management systems (ie Opentext, SharePoint, M-Files, etc.). While such systems are good at managing documents they are weak when it comes to email management. 

To support each area of a business, documents and email correspondence need to be stored in a central data area (or Common Data Environment). However, relying on business users to maintain good email filing discipline can be problematical.  A lack of user consistency when filing, can compromise project management; customer service, increase the risk of losing money during litigation or un-invoiced revenue, or simply just waste lots of valuable user time filing emails or searching for email content.   

What was needed to solve such challenges was to combine an intelligent email filing capability, with the existing document management system. I found this in Knowledgemill.  It has reinforced my view of the importance of having an automated/intelligent email management capability to support business. 

At Knowledgemill I have been working with many professional services companies from construction, legal and accounting to unlock the value of email and document content. Knowledgemill supports the business to bridge content silos and drive insights, efficiencies, automation and governance.

A good example of this is with a global accounting firm who are using Knowledgemill and their selected document management system to create a Common Data Area for emails and documents, kept up-to-date in real time. With seamless ‘out of the box’ integration, these documents and emails can be seen and used in their Sales system, their accounting system and their legal system to provide support for all their business processes.

I would be pleased to demonstrate/discuss how Knowledgemill can help your business, explain the system in more detail and show how Knowledgemill could help your organisation.  Click on the link www.knowledgemill.com for further details.