I had a great conversation recently with Mark Anderson, Executive Vice President of Overtone Software, Inc., and Mark Presnell, CEO at Ability Software Ltd. Overtone offers several interesting and useful solutions for creating and managing content from Microsoft Corp. Exchange e-mail or SharePoint collaboration deployments. Overtone is also the exclusive North American distributor and reseller for what I feel has become Overtone's "jewel in the crown," the AbilitySuite for IBM Corp.'s Lotus Notes.
The solution offers three levels of archiving and archive management, all selectable and configurable by enterprise IT and business decision-makers. The first level supports basic archiving based on simple rules, and focuses on capturing all e-mails for compliance and governance purposes. The next level combines support for more complex rules with methods for reducing overall archive and mailbox size, without sacrificing access to full content. (I'm intentionally compressing and simplifying here; more details are of course available at the Overtone Software Web site.)
The coolest stuff happens at the third level, however. That's where consolidation and integration of diverse incumbent compliance, discovery, litigation support, and records and security management tools can happen. That's also where enterprises can tag and categorize e-mails based on their own specific business goals, needs, and processes. It's also where Overtone's powerful AbilitySuite Central Search Portal can be used to find almost anything you'd care to find in a centralized message archive. That's why the company refers to what happens at this level as "Information Governance," or "E-mail Knowledge Management."
But look carefully at what that archive can tell you, not just about e-mails and collaborations, but about business processes. A growing number of my analyst industry colleagues are increasingly reporting that high percentages of business-critical intellectual property (IP) reside in those e-mails. That means that once you can not only search through archives, but analyze content and collaboration "flows," you can determine much about what people are doing, and how and why they're doing it. In other words, you can get a lot closer to human-centric BPM.
Suppose you could easily see, for example, that changes to the IT infrastructure or customer-facing business processes were accompanied by spikes in e-mails to, from, or among certain internal constituencies. Might not that information be useful in helping to make (or unmake) refinements to the IT infrastructure and/or relevant processes? Similarly, if e-mails containing particular enterprise IP elements increase or decrease in response to particular business and/or IT changes, that e-mail pattern shift might tell you valuable things as well. For example, you might equip e-mail users not already so equipped with a shared portal, to make sharing of the IP they're using easier for them and perhaps more secure for the enterprise.
Overtone is not the only e-mail archiving solution vendor out there, of course, and if you're using an e-mail archive, you can already apply some useful analysis to at least some of the information stored there. However, what makes the Overtone AbilitySuite stand out, from my BPM-centric perspective, is the combination of its reporting and integration features. Also, since it is built to be closely aligned with the Lotus Notes platform, it is poised to take full advantage of the improvements IBM recently made to that platform, as discussed here previously.
Heck, I can easily imagine a day when real-time and near-real-time e-mail traffic analysis is used not only to flag and route around IT infrastructure problems, but to highlight and spur refinements in business processes. But then, Mom always said I was naively optimistic. Nonetheless, the Overtone folks seem to share at least some of my optimism and excitement about the real and potential links between e-mail archive management and BPM improvement and optimization. But as always, I'm most interested in what YOU think, so do please let me know.
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
