15 years ago, the ping of an incoming email was the most delightful feeling for me. Let's be honest, who didnt look forward to sending and receiving emails? Whether we were on Yahoo, Hotmail, Rediffmail, or whatever, we loved email. Period. So much that, often, we had multiple email ids on multiple service providers.
However, somewhere along the way, that love fell sour. Or should I say, email as a communications medium, lost its way. Its strength became its downfall. Today, i wake up in the morning dreading at the prospect of facing my email fears. I step out for 5 minutes - and come back to 25 emails staring back at me. I hate emails.
From an enterprise perspective, although email is considered one of the most significant advances in workforce productivity over the past 30 years, today it has become one of the greatest organizational burdens.
- IT industry analysts estimate that 108 billion work emails are sent daily, requiring employees to check their inboxes an average of 36 times an hour.
- only 14 percent of those emails are of critical importance.
- Volume of email interaction still outpaces social collaboration by a wide margin. In fact, according to IT industry firm IDC, email remains the single most widely used collaboration tool, with worldwide revenue for enterprise email expected to reach $4.7 billion in 2017
Today, email has become a necessary evil. We use it to do the "boring" stuff; the fun stuff is shared on Social media platform. That is our workaround. So, how can one make email more fun, more social, more collaborative - and more lovable?
First see this announcement:
Here's a video (cool, i think):
There are 3-things in IBM Verse that will make you rediscover your love for email. All over again!
- A Built-in "Personal Assistant" that helps you cut through your email and tasks. This "Personal assistant" quickly finds and prioritizes the tasks that matter most. With lightning-fast search and built-in intelligence, it analyzes – and eventually even predicts – user behaviors and preferences in order to personalize an employee’s unique social mail experience.
- "Executive Assistant" that reads through emails and gives you the answers you need. Clients using IBM Verse will also have the future option to embed a Watson feature into their collaboration environment, which enables users to query Watson on a given topic and receive a direct reply with answers ranked by degree of confidence.
- Intuitive Design that focuses on People, not Emails. Coming from IBM, i did not expect the UX to be friendly, but am i wrong or what! See this for example: IBM Verse enables subject matter experts to share insight in two clicks or less in any social environment inside or outside their organization.
So, Is IBM Verse = (Facebook + Google Inbox + DropBox)? It is actually much more than that simple equation. Security. That is the secret ingredient in IBM Verse. Unlike Google, user preference data is not collected and sold to 3rd party advertisers.
