By Vishal Shanbhag – Inbotiqa, Director of Technology

Before embarking on my journey with Inbotiqa, I spent several years as a technologist in charge of developing and managing workflow solutions in the banking industry. My team was often responsible for automating business processes that involved collaboration between several groups.

Whether it was processing loan applications, trades or even responding to customers’ queries, it was as if the data associated with that process was being passed through, to borrow from manufacturing paradigm, an ‘assembly line’. The various groups involved were the ‘skilled craftsmen’, tasked with doing parts of the assembly.

But what about the conveyor? – the other key component of the assembly line.

As desktop computers replaced typewriters, email became the conveyor. Email itself has now been around for more than two decades and is now omnipresent, an essential tool for enterprises. An email address is one of the first resources that is allotted to a new employee. All sorts of communications, from reports and approvals to holiday applications, are routed via email.

Email addresses are not limited to personal work email addresses. Teams or sometimes even whole divisions and departments have email addresses and distribution lists to allow for dissemination of information beyond just individuals. Often, such email addresses become essential parts of business processes. Then each email that arrives on such a team email address is not just a piece of communication – it is a task or a to-do. As such, it has implicit requirements such as an expectation of response or a timeliness of completing the action.

However, email lacks inbuilt support for the distribution of work, reporting or audit. Of course, here the argument in favour email is that it always meant to be a channel for the dissemination of information – and it is extremely efficient at that. That said, these additional expectations have led businesses to look for alternative solutions to cater to these expectations. Workflow solutions cater to exactly this need, whether readymade or developed in-house.

I spent years developing several such solutions, which almost always catered to a specific problem or businesses process. I call these “point” solutions. Each point solution worked efficiently for the specific process and improved efficiency, time savings, cost savings and so on.

“Despite moving the core process out of email

into a point solution, we ended up

integrating the point solution with email.”

 

These point solutions would result in applications that would have a separate internal conveyor for flow of information. End users were expected to look into the application for information associated with their specific business process. Over time, we observed that we would get requests from end users such as notifications of new tasks and status changes – via email. There were even cases where the arrival of an email at some specific address was the starting point of a process.

Then there were managers who would rather check reports delivered to their email account than check them by opening the business application. So despite moving the core process out of email into a point solution, we ended up integrating the point solution with email.

Today, most employees in large organizations start the day by checking their email. It’s an essential part of every employee’s routine. The aforementioned problems with email continue to exist and so do the point solutions that attempt to solve them. It’s almost as if there is an impending need for convergence of both.

At Inbotiqa, we recognized this need for convergence of email and workflow. One of our first steps in product development was a seamless integration with email. YUDOmail now provides not only a workflow solution but something that can totally replace team mailboxes or distribution lists. YUDOmail was not the first solution to address this need, but it created the next evolutionary step. And with the addition of YUDOsmart to the Inbotiqa platform, the next leap is made. Suffice to say, as email itself enters its 50s (as suggested by wiki entry on email) the stage is set for some exciting changes.