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22 Comments
- RavuAlHemio, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Enhance productivity by keeping employee morale down? Helpful.
- vibez, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Wouldn't a better way of increasing productivity be to monitor how much work an employee does rather than how much they email?
- heptahedron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6True, but it assumes that managers (and workers) have enough of a clue to be able to predict how much work a given task should take. Productivity goals only work on predictable heavily routinized tasks with low statistical variation on labor. Thus, measuring output works with cellphone assemblers, but not software engineers.
The more creativity and innovation in the task, the less predictable the completion date and the harder it is to determine if employees are putting in a reasonable amount of effort.
Of course, if the management can't trust the workers (or the workers haven't acted in a trustworthy fashion), then the company has much bigger problems that Xobni can't solve. - filippod, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I agree completely. Control is a poor surrogate for good, motivating and objective-oriented management. There are countless ways to waste time, you can't control them all.
- Alex.w, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Whats with -diggs on this comment, its spot on. I wouldn't work for some one that thought they could summarize my productivity by the pattern of who and when I email, that's just dumb.
- bede, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Could be wrong, but I imagine Brezina and Smith *are* the company.
- Cossins, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Maybe they should sit down for just 5 minutes, and I'm sure they can come up with a better name for their company. I mean, seriously, would *you* buy something from company that has a name suspiciously similar to the alien overlord tyrant referred to in Scientology lore?
I wouldn't. :-P
- Simon - forgetfulca, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Too bad their phb customers weren't more creative, they wouldn't need to resort to the lash.
This is just another 'fu, wageslave' kick in the package. - biffta, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I wonder do Brezina and Smith use Xobni in their company.
- rytr23, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Talk about another hit to the old employee morale. It's a wonder they don't start putting bars on the windows to make the prison motif complete. And companies wonder why thier talent leaves for greener and less restrictive pastures. Granted, there are certainly abuses with many things in the workplace, but if someone is abusing email, they are probably showing many other signs of wasting the company's money. This is just unnecessary. But some douchebag middle manager will see this written about in some ad ridden trade paper and covince his boss that this is the cats ass. *****.
- SlowOnTheUptake, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1A lot of companies have been trying to develop a market for this sort of product for the past few years but it seems to me that it's based on a flawed idea of how to increase efficiency and even less so if the object is to improve the quality of what they deliver. Somehow this reminds me of the work Fredrick Taylor did around 1900. It seems to be based on the idea of controlling the actions of large numbers of people to get them to work in a uniform and controlled manner, great if you want the workers to be meat robots, but not so great if you want to foster innovation. Better yet to improve the quality of the automated systems and use people to do what people do best: think for themselves.
- Junto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Also, it reminds me of a day I'll never forget many many years ago....
-- Cue large corporate meeting room --
Boss: So printed out here is every email you've personally ever sent or received at [COMPANY NAME].
-- Stare at visibly VERY large mountain of A4 paper spanning 1.5 years --
Me: Jesus, that's half the Amazon basin deforested.... You read all of that? God, what a boring job.
Boss: You've been using your work email for personal reasons. I'm afraid that is against clause 23.4.2 of your employee ethical code. We will have to let you go.
Me: Oh, so we aren't going to read any of them? Some of the jokes my friends sent to me were hilarious... - Junto, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Ah yes, cue the 11am visit to the bog to read the newspaper.
Such a great time waster. :-) - Dutchmang, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1For your personal mail? Of course that's the right thing to do. But if you're conducting biz outside of your organization's systems (including IM) you are creating risk for your company and yourself.
- TheReighnMan, on 06/25/2008, -0/+0WE ARE!!!! GO MATT!!!
- mbrezina, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Monitoring personal email use is not the objective of our software. Journalists seem to want to sensationalize anything resembling “Big Brother.â€
We’ve posted a response to the article in our blog. www.xobni.com/blog
Our software allows employees to mark email addresses as personal, removing those emails from a manager’s analysis. Xobni Analytics functions as a tool for individuals as well as their managers.
Email is a big part of all of our work days. If we can understand how we use email, we can begin to use it better. A personal use version will be out soon. - retsoced, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1That's great that the fine, fine folks over at Xobni are trying to let us "obviously misinformed miscreants" know that their software is better than what the article title would have us believe. Thanks.
The issue really isn't how good the software can be, or what its intended use is - it's the simple fact that it will be abused. It will be used to exactly how the title of the article states. I've seen it happen, more than once. The folks who create the software have little to no control over how it will be used.
PHBs are like the scientists in Jurassic park:
"You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you knew what you had, you patented it, packages it, slapped in on a plastic lunch box, and now you want to sell it.....
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. Science can create pesticides, but it can' tell us not to use them. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it can't tell us not to build it!" - gd007, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1very creative name for their product.
- amsmith, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0"While we appreciate the attention, we feel Xobni is misrepresented."
http://www.xobni.com/blog/2006/09/04/25/ - bugbear, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0> This is just another 'fu, wageslave' kick in the package.
I know these guys, and Xobni's purpose is not really to monitor email abuse. It's to figure out things like which email is most valuable to you (e.g. whose email do you delete most often unread?), and to analyze trends in who you've talked to over time. There are plenty of tools already to monitor easy stuff like using work email for personal messages. The Globe just chose to focus on that possibility as a way to generate some fake controversy.
Sigh. pwned by the mainstream media once again. - dbabbitt, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1I use google mail and try to avoid that nasty Lotus Notes they foist upon us.
- chris9902, on 10/12/2007, -10/+4"Xobni (that's inbox spelled backward)"
LMAO, like he needed to point that out.
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