Earth-shattering project ideas. Resumes. Things in between.
Let’s face it. Organizational e-mail is a disgraceful tragedy. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Outlook, Notes, or a cloud-based solution. They all suck.
As an electronic interoffice memo, e-mail fits the bill. The problem is what we try to do with it. A modern organization requires coordination, understanding, and distributed problem solving. The transactional model of an interoffice memo is not well suited to that requirement. Obviously work gets done in the presence of e-mail, but I claim it’s despite, rather than because of.
We probably want something intermediate between a formal ticketing system and conventional e-mail. When you fire off a note, you’re looking for some combination of (a) action and (b) information, which may itself lead to more action. When you reply, it’s either to provide information, deliverables, or commitment to action. That means the system ought to model communication not as being between people, but rather as about topics/missions, and to which various people may reasonably contribute in their ways. It should keep track of questions, ideas, and action items; track what’s been responded and what’s overdue; and automatically flag down the right people when a process is stuck for any reason. It should model the fact that some issues depend for their solution on others, or only seem to. It should use that logic, along with organizational priorities, to highlight the most important or valuable issues any given person can be working on just now. And it should also tell you when your own pet projects are stuck behind a long list of higher priorities.
Part of a solution might be:
We may postulate that each document:
Ticketing and workflow may be seen as a highly-structured application of publish/subscribe. Automated notifications could amount to publishing documents with carefully-chosen tags and topics.
There’s a sense in which Google Wave was sort of like this. But only sort of. You could add people to a “wave”, but this was more of a collaborative document than an intelligent work-front.
“Social media” is also not a proper model. Sure you have a feed of posts and responses, but there’s no clear concept of an issue life-cycle. Posts live until they are deleted, and they are never deleted, so it’s impossible to tell what to work on.
Actual ticketing systems as we currently understand them (e.g. bugzilla or jira) are probably too formal and rigid. They are designed around particular classes of work-flow (such as defect management) but I expect users to define and refine process steps as they go along.
Yeah, I’m not sure when yet. But maybe soon?