Unlocking the Secrets in Your Email Archive for Competitive Advantage

April 15, 2010 - PRLog -- In today’s global marketplace, any edge your business can gain on its competitors is vital. Companies cannot afford to not tap into the data, statistics and analytics that may already exist in-house, whether this relates to how they could be improving sales, decision making processes or how they are dealing with customer complaints.

The terms Competitive Intelligence (CI) and Business Intelligence (BI) are becoming increasingly more common in today’s working world; broadly speaking, they both exist to help understand more about your company’s data and how it can improve performance, productivity and results. CI specifically is a process that transforms disaggregated information into relevant, accurate and usable strategic knowledge about competitors, performance, capabilities and intentions. BI refers more to computer-based techniques which can analyse business data.

Many companies are successfully engaging with CI and BI processes but there’s one particular area of data which hasn’t yet been fully tapped into – email. How valuable would it be to have a competitive advantage that leverages collective knowledge within company email? With an estimated 247 billion emails sent per day in 2009 (source: pingdom.com) and a typical email user sending around 41 emails during a normal working day (source: Osterman Research White Paper October 2008), email archiving is simply not just about being data storage - it is more about leveraging an untapped wealth of email business intelligence to improve your business!

The leading executives must have a way of keeping ‘connected’ to their company. They cannot engage with every employee at every level or wait for their investment in data warehousing technologies – they need to have transparency, insight and intelligence about their company in order to have the best possible perspective when it comes to making decisions and leading the company. Data sources have traditionally been from finance, product, sales and marketing but the daily mass of email communications from employees to customers, partners and suppliers can no longer be ignored. Being able to tap into this valuable resource, pull reports from it and make enquiries into it instantly is accomplished through implementing a robust email archiving and e-discovery solution, such as those which Evaden Limited provides to its clients through Evaden the Unified Mail Communication (UMC) platform.

Exactly how could you be using email data for intelligence activities to gain competitive advantage for your business? One way would be to improve customer intelligence; rather than having to wait for weekly or monthly sales reports, managers could search for and find all of the emails to and from specific customers for any time frame or containing any key words. The search result would be a detailed chronology of communications or negotiations that could be studied for insights, trends and opportunities to improve service or to create new deals.

It could also be used to improve project intelligence – in the same manner of search by project name, keyword or case number, a project’s detailed chronology would be available to analyse or share with authorised users. A common need to share project papers when a team member is unavailable can often mean the difference between winning or losing a contract.

Workforce intelligence could additionally be analysed; when management understands the details, motivations and the outcome of decisions at every level, there is an exponential increase in understanding how and why your organisation is moving in the right or wrong direction. Being able to see these patterns and influences gives an executive perspective to make improvements. This is the real power that has never been drawn from unstructured email data sources before.

CXOs should also be asking opportunity questions quarterly to every senior manager such as “How can we become a smarter business by utilising email intelligence in your area?” – specifics to the Compliance Officer could be “how many compliance audits have we had?”, “How many have requested email records to be produced within a week?”, “How fast can we find and produce emails for audits?” etc.

Even questions such as “Who are our top email users?”, “Who are our top email abusers?”, “How often has intellectual property been sent to unauthorised people and how can we better protect it?” can be looked into to help gain a better understanding of email data. And this is a good point to raise the issue of ethics – a long-held issue of discussion amongst CI and BI practitioners – what exactly is and is not permissible?

A number of the requirements from the Data Protection Act will come into effect whenever an employer wants to ‘monitor’ workers. And employees have rights to know how they are being monitored under the Data Protection and Human Rights Acts – this naturally covers email and internet use. Monitoring is a part of working life and employees will expect some level of this but the best way forward for any business is to establish a clear ‘Acceptable Use Policy’ (AUP) stating how employees are expected to use business communications. This will also inform employees about when they may use business communications for personal use. All employees should be made aware of the policy and, in turn, it should be agreed to by all of the employees.

Data Protection issues aside, which I would recommend further research on for anyone wishing to participate with email intelligence analysis, the benefits of tapping into this wealth of information which could be used to get ahead of your competitors is invaluable and far outweighs any downside. Evaden is already doing it for clients; unlock the potential in your email data today as your competitors soon will be.