Let’s admit it. Be honest and raise your hand in the following question: “Have you ever forwarded an e-mail received in your business account to your personal account?” And don’t try to give me the kind of cheap excuses like: “I want to be able to check it later from home…” simply because you never check it from home. So what’s wrong with you anyway?
It is called INSECURITY. You want extra insurance that “this” mail is not going to be lost. That this e-mail rests securely in more than one server. I’m with you on this 100% and yes I feel like the grandpa who puts the bucks under his mattress…But there is an inherent issue with this approach as you end up having to sustain the same information in a “repository” not intended for this purpose.
So, business mails in the business account and “other” mails in their account right? Wrong. What are these “other” mails? Unless you’re a secret agent and the “other” stuff should be secretly kept from everyone (even from you), you should explore them as business “assets”.
I mean, why you allow everyone’s opinion to affect your business through your trendy platform integrations with (facebook, LinkedIn, twitter etc) but you’re shutting the door to information that you should trust more – it’s your private e-mail account remember? You shouldn’t by any means. Every bit of information poured down to you can and should be exploited. Why you don’t try the other way round and incorporate your “private” and business mails into your collaboration/ CRM/ tasks management SaaS system – You have one right?
Most of the collaboration, CRM, tasks management systems give you the ability (through their APIs), to incorporate your gmail, exchange, yahoo etc. accounts as it is of utmost importance to have all information integrated. This way you are able to pass information contained in e-mails to colleagues, create tasks, notifications and so forth.
What I really like the most is exploring what I call the “path to knowledge”. You’ll be amazed to see how far (horizontally and vertically) this information, contained in a single mail, can go and how many people can benefit from it and how much it affects their productivity. And that is the magic provided by the true collaboration platforms. The ability to integrate, share, link and create knowledge as well as the capacity to track the knowledge’s activity history!
