Helping Your IT Clients — And You — Achieve Inbox Zero With Big Data Analytics

By Frances Angulo, Director of Support and Education, Datameer

More money, more problems. As you move up the workforce ladder, you can pretty much expect one thing to be true: your email inbox is going to explode. More than you thought was possible. With all of the talk around Big Data, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if I could use Big Data analytics to figure out how to combat (or at least better prepare myself for) the inevitable.

It was pretty easy to determine that between the hours of 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. EST, I receive an email on average every 13 minutes and 68 percent of them are considered “actionable.” For the purposes of this analysis, I defined actionable as “requiring a response.” The problem with being productivity obsessed is that email has never quite fit efficiently into my workflow. I’m constantly faced with the challenge to make a split second decision. Do I answer this now or do I defer, mark unread, ignore, flag, tag, label, color code, remind me later, turn off email, or throw my phone out the door?

Big Data?

Believe it or not, my email counts as Big Data. I face the challenge of decreasing time to decision-making whilst the complexity of my information is increasing. I have email coming in at a high velocity from various users at all levels of priority who are making requests, comments, and sending messages both overt and subliminal in nature.

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