Hi, my name is Patrick White and I’d like to introduce you to Ally Software. Ally was started 6 months ago, and originally addressed a funny little problem – email overload. One of my pet peeves has always been email overload, especially having worked as a Product Manager. The question I posed was, how can I decrease my email, or increase my throughput? As anyone will tell you, it’s not an easy question to answer. There are solutions you can put in place for people to get answers to questions they might otherwise ask through email and there are tools that will help you quickly respond to an email, but in both cases I felt the overhead wasn’t worth the actual time savings.
As Ally began to mature, and we began developing prototypes, I started to understand the broader role email plays in organizations. I realized that what we were really attempting to develop was a solution to decrease explicit communication (I use the term explicit here very intentionally). Email is so powerful because of the way it breaks down traditional lines of communication and silos, so the problem we were trying to solve should never have been how to deal with email itself, but instead how to create more implicit communication across groups and silos.
Ally Software’s first product, Harmony, is launching in June and directly addresses one of the most complex aspects of cross group communication. I’ll share more as launch gets closer, but in the meantime, if you’d like to be a part of our Beta in March, feel free to email us at beta@allysoftware.com.
Print | posted on Thursday, February 12, 2009 10:50 AM