Enterprise Pain Points

Over on TechCrunch, there’s a story about Seriosity. Seriosity figures your email avalanche would be more manageable if the sender attached “Serios” (currency) to your email as a measure of how important that peice of email is to the sender. You in turn would reply with the same or different “Serios” to confirm, increase or reduce the important of the email message. “Serios” are scarce so you would be economical with your currency, only marking certain peices of email as important.

Last time I checked (2 seconds ago), all enterprise email systems have tags for Importance or Priority (low, important, high, etc). Most will sort by priority/importance by default. And it doesn’t look like this solution is going to save you any additional time processing all of the email systems you have today. So to who does this idea make any sense to?

Let me tell you a quick story…

I have a friend who’s CIO of a large company. He was extremely busy, all of the time. Not surprising. I hadn’t jumped into the GTD thing as much as I have now, and I was curious at the time how Mike got so many things done. So I asked him one day.

Here’s what he said…

“My secret to getting things done is simple…”

“First, when people have a problem, they’ll email you.”

“When they send you email, don’t respond. If it’s important, they’ll mark it URGENT.”

“If you see an URGENT email, don’t respond. If it’s important, they’ll Phone you.”

“Second, if people call you, don’t answer. If it’s important, they’ll call back.”

“If they call you back, don’t answer. If it’s important, they’ll come to your office.”

“Third. Close your office door. Focus on what you need to do, they’ll figure it out and come back to you later with the solution, not the problem.”

Great story! The point is, we don’t need email to figure out what’s important. Any company that relies on Store and Forward technology to get things done is Doomed. Any company that invests strategically in add-on products to “fix” email is Doomed!

The kicker is, Seriosity got $6 million in VC funding. Wow! Pretty cool.

I’m looking for funding for a similar Email add-on. It’s tied into what I call a VOIP-VOG System. VOG = Voice of God. When you tag messages as critical, once your email is received, it will Proclaim LOUDLY in a Room-Shaking GOD-like Voice “I COMMAND YOU TO READ THIS EMAIL!”. If you’ve been slacking, this will get your attention in a big way.

I need about $12 million to get it off the ground. VC’s please contact me.

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Ok, it’s not the worst idea in the world, and probably has some merit. Is this solution worthy of Enterprise investment. Let me know, add your comment below.