Re: Article: email is new database

"Kenneth Downs" <knode.wants.this_at_see.sigblock> wrote in message news:ig2rj2-eqm.ln1_at_pluto.downsfam.net...
> This is a fairly interesting link:
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4167633.stm
>
> The gist of it is that people have a lot of info stored in email, so it is
> a
> de-facto database, if not an intended or discplined one.

I think you'll find that the bulk of this relates to private email accounts rather than internal/external email accounts within an organisation. I look at email as a data source, rather than a database, but from the end-user perspective, I agree, it is as if their email were a database of "things".

> The article describes email search techniques, which are probably useful
> enough to an individual, but what about the relationship of email to the
> more structure and secured operational databases that companies use?
>
> So lets you say you have a company doing some type of custom work, such as
> making molds for plastic injection (or a software company). They have
> some
> type of job control software perhaps integrated with their accounting.
> How
> does the structured job control system relate to the unstructured emails
> that go back and forth between the customer and the project manager? Not
> the emails going out from a system as notifications, but the emails going
> person-to-person in which the project is being discussed.
>
> Seems to me these emails should somehow be pumped through a pipe that
> gloms
> useful information out of them and adds them to the paper trail for
> projects and things. Not a small job however, wish I could say how to do
> it.

Often at the end of such trails is a time-billing system which accumulates phone, fax, professional time-for-this, professional time-for-that. Often it is handy to itemise email stubs (ie: subject, recipient, date, time) and include this stream into a "draft staging" area within the time-billing for review of the professional.

After the billing phase the stubs remain as project history. Routine program tasks can "harvest" this information automatically once a few key issues are addressed.

The key issue is allocating internal reference numbers, or job numbers to each of the outgoing & incoming emails. This then permits joins to the time-billing "module", and the job history "module" directly.

Pete Brown
Falls Creek
Oz
www.mountainman.com.au Received on Sun Apr 24 2005 - 14:34:46 CEST