Google Priority Inbox: Canned the Spam, Now Frying Bacn

September 8, 2010 – 9:24 am

We have a guest blogger today!  Abbas Haider Ali, AVP of Sales Advisors here at xMatters will be contributing to the What Matters Now blog on a regular basis.  You may have caught his recent post on the 5 things that matter to him.  Going forward, he’ll be contributing a few times a month.  Here’s his first post on Google Priority Inbox.

I’m a huge fan of using software smarts to filter out the noise in our highly connected lives.  I have work email accounts (Outlook + Exchange), personal accounts (Gmail and Yahoo), and a bunch of social channels (Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, etc.).  With all of these firing away it’s hard to decide what really needs attention right now. With all that as background, I was pretty psyched when I heard about Google Priority Inbox and found that I access to it on one of my accounts.

There’s a great piece on TechCrunch that has some early tips and tricks to start getting the most out of this feature. I would love to see something like this become available for Exchange/Outlook, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.  It also reminded me of how without intelligence in email and other communication channels, we wind up doing a lot of “follow-up” messaging, or using alternate channels to prod people into reading stuff that we believe either got buried, or ignored.

I see a lot of my IT Operations and IT Service Desk clients facing this challenge all the time.  They notify people about critical outages and send out requests for them via email.  Then wait for 5-15 minutes and follow-up with a phone call – “Did you get my email?  Can you take the incident?  Can you join the response coordination conference call?” It would be funny if it wasn’t the same story across hundreds of clients.  Multiply that by the number of incidents at each.  Throw in other processes like change management, notifying impacted users, stakeholders, etc. and you have a giant amount of email, largely destined to be missed.

Google Priority Inbox reminds me a lot about the approach that I recommend to clients where they can incorporate relevance engines into their communication stream to make sure that if it’s important it gets someone’s attention.  Instead of an email for a critical event, they get a SMS message, or maybe a live phone call where a friendly text-to-speech engine relays key information.  Imagine that – prioritized delivery of information, and less clutter in IT department email inboxes everywhere.

Now back to sifting through my Outlook Inbox (and Junk) folder to see if there are any golden nuggets of information in there…

Update: A few people commented that there appears to be a typo in the title in the word “bacn”.  To clarify – it’s not.  It refers to a term that describes emails you want, but just not right away.  Check out the Wikipedia definition for more detail.

By What Matters Now | Posted in IT services, xMatters | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Personalized alerts in the enterprise – an interview with Troy McAlpin

September 7, 2010 – 12:20 pm

xMatters CEO, Troy McAlpin, recently sat down with Sramana Mitra, a recognized blogger on entrepreneurship and a strategy consultant in the Silicon Valley. The seven part Entrepreneur Journeys series called, Personalized Alerts in the Enterprise: xMatters CEO Troy McAlpin.

Check it out on Sramana’s blog to learn all about Troy’s journey as an entrepreneur.  He discusses his start at Anderson as a consultant and his transition into business development at AT&T as well as his experience working for a healthy cola company.  He also dives into his transition into technology and how at 27 he felt ready to be a CEO and took over a software company in the computer-aided design and manufacturing space. Troy and Sramana talk a lot about the evolution of xMatters, from how he did research to explore the effective uses of mobile devices in business processes to how he relaunched the product in 2006 to better serve other markets and why AlarmPoint became xMatters.

It’s a great read and provides a ton of insight into Troy’s background and xMatters’ approach.

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Why your customers don’t want to talk to you

September 1, 2010 – 8:45 am

Harvard Business Review published a blog post by Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff called “Why your Customers don’t want to talk to you”.  We thought it was a great post that talked about how most corporations overestimate the amount in which their customers actually want to talk to them.  The data HBR shows is that customers value self-service just as much as live service.  Self-service is incredibly appealing to the masses – in fact Dixon and Ponomareff propose that customers lean towards self-service because they don’t want a relationship with customers. They pose a question at the end of their post: Are we seeing a change in customer preferences – or a relationship on the rocks?

Here at xMatters, we’re also seeing a change in customer preferences.  As we’ve talked about in previous posts, individuals are on information overload – they are bombarded with emails, phone calls, offers and messages on an hourly basis.  This information overkill is leading people to only want information relevant to what matters to them.  Whether this is emails regarding systems and processes they own, or offers in the stores they shop in, people are tired of the massive amount of info being thrown at them. This is what makes self-service so appealing – they get to be in control of how they interact with you, your company, and your products.

What do you think?

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Did you feel that?

August 26, 2010 – 2:22 pm

If you felt a tremble recently it may have been the fierce dedication of the San Jose Earthquakes.  Why does this matter?  We just can’t get enough of soccer player Geovanni Deiberson Maurício, midfielder for the Earthquakes.  On Monday, August 16, 2010 it was as official as Apple’s success with the iPad, xMatters is now a proud sponsor for Geovanni.

Admit it, we all found ourselves joining the recent soccer revolution that swept the US during the World Cup.  And frankly with Geovanni’s technical skills on the field and our technology it is a match made in heaven.

Geovanni, number 77 that is, has a seriously impressive background…he played for Barcelona, Benfica, Manchester City, and Hull City before he came to San Jose.  Are you a fan yet?  Take a glance at some highlights and let us know.

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Five Things That Matter to Me

August 25, 2010 – 8:35 am

Abbas Haider Ali, AVP of Sales Advisors here at xMatters is our guest blogger today.  Check out the five things that matter to him.

Like most people, what matters to me is always in flux.  It changes with trends in technology, what projects I’m working on, what my clients are up to, what season it is, and pretty much any other variable you could think of.  The list below reflects literally what matters to me right now as I write this post on Sunday, August 22, 2010 at 10:11pm from the Westin Peachtree in Atlanta.

  1. Technology: My iPhone 4.  Why?  Because I just did a short walking tour of downtown Atlanta and took my wife along via FaceTime + Sprint MiFi, checking into interesting spots on Foursquare, and validating the supposedly good restaurants by checking Yelp reviews.  It really is the ultimate Swiss Army knife in my life and that’s reflected by the apps that are on the 1st page of my iPhone.
  2. Keeping Current: I like to keep up to date on lots of stuff and like a lot of people I rely on various online sources of information to do that.  I used to have a giant list of bookmarks and as time permitted I would browse through content.  And then a while ago I started using Google Reader and subscribed to RSS feeds for what I had previously bookmarked.  That was good.  And then came the Reeder app for both iPhone and iPad.  Now I consume way more information, do it far more efficiently, and can easily share it with other people via Twitter, Posterous, Facebook, etc.  That combined with some specialized long form reading apps for the iPad like New York Times, NPR, and the BBC round-up my information funnel.  I’ve been experimenting most recently with the FlipBoard app as well but it’s mostly for random browsing.
  3. Personal Goals: I tend to have fairly skewed work/life balance so this tends to be a soft target for me but I am in the process of signing up for a Level 1 language class.  Two choices – Mandarin or Spanish.  It would take a whole post to outline my active reasoning process behind the choice. If you have any particularly strong opinions, feel free to share them as comments to this post.
  4. Professional Goals: We’re about to enter September which tends to be a very busy month as our clients come back from vacations and all of a sudden projects pick up both in number and urgency.  My biggest challenge them becomes a resource one.  Of all the activities (some quick, some fairly involved) that my team could be involved with, which ones should we focus in on with our clients?  It feels like a global scale game of Tetris sometimes.
  5. Random Thing That Matters: Getting my car to a detailing place that can get rid of bird dropping stains using a clay bar or some other super stain removal approach. It seems that the best paint protection technology is no match for a Washington D.C. bird’s diet + a little acid rain + high heat + strong sunshine.

Best,

Abbas

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