Software may let boss spot your e-mail abuse
Big Brother is moving into the e-mail business. But could it be a good thing?
Xobni Analytics, a Cambridge-based software firm started by two recent college graduates, has developed a program that will provide businesses with detailed information on their employees' e-mailing habits.
While the cofounders of the firm -- Matt Brezina, 25, and Adam Smith, 21 -- say their software will equip companies with a tool to enhance productivity, some critics say it could also take a major chunk out of workers' ever-dwindling reserve of Internet privacy.
The Xobni software, which should be available for individual use Sept. 20 and is expected to be rolled out to businesses starting this winter, works by measuring the amount of time people spend reading and writing e-mails. From there, Xobni (that's inbox spelled backward) can chart when people send and receive e-mails, as well as how long it takes them to reply to messages (woe to the desk jockey who replies instantly to co-workers but takes hours to get back to the boss).
``We can tell you how quickly you're responding to your customers and how much attention you're giving them, in terms of time," Brezina says. ``We can tell you the cost of a single e-mail, in terms of company man-hours."
The result, Brezina and Smith believe, will be the ability to identify and eliminate wasted time. One business has already come to them complaining that too many of their employees drain their colleagues' time by copying long lists of unnecessary people on their e-mails. That, Brezina and Smith say, is a problem that could be remedied by tracking e-mail habits.
``What we can start to do is predict," Brezina says. If an employee wanted to send an e-mail with numerous people copied on it, for example, before that person hits send, a box would pop up saying how many hours that e-mail would cost the company and questioning whether the worker still wanted to send it.
``Essentially what we can do is allow people to start to change behaviors," Brezina says.
Long, drawn-out e-mail threads, which Brezina and Smith say could frequently be reduced to brief in-person conversations, are another area of focus for the software. Xobni, which is designed as an add-in for
By tracking e-mail , the software would also be able to recognize patterns in e-mail coming in from the outside. For instance, if data showed that Company A tended to receive e-mail from a major client at a certain time, then the employees at Company A would know that if they sent their e-mail to the client at that time, chances are the client would be sitting at his computer and have the new message come in at the top of his inbox.
As useful an efficiency tool as it seems, Xobni also has the potential to be a threat to the privacy of employees, some say. According to Stephen Goldstein, who has more than 20 years of experience in the communications and information technology industry and is the managing partner of the local firm, Growth Advisors, many companies already track e-mail for security and data-mining purposes, but no software other than Xobni has the capability to break down exactly when employees are sending e-mail and how much time they're spending doing it.
Brezina and Smith's program, therefore, could just as easily be used to crack down on employees spending too much time sending messages to family and friends as it could on overzealous office CCers.
The two insist that they are uninterested in ``identifying Bill sending an e-mail to his girlfriend," but acknowledge that the software could be used that way.
To address the privacy issue, Brezina and Smith have built several privacy settings into their program. Filters would give administrators the option of allowing workers to create lists of personal e-mail addresses they want blocked from the software and the compiled statistics, Smith says.
Whether to use the filters would still be up to the business, though, and despite their opposition to monitoring personal messages, Brezina says that ultimately they'll listen to their customers and ``give them what they want."
If used responsibly, Xobni could represent an advance in protecting workers' e-mail privacy, according to Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on human rights in the workplace.
The current problem, he says, is that most e-mail analysis software doesn't have any way to exempt personal e-mail , so companies end up trolling through their workers' personal matters in the process of monitoring work-related messages. ``Incredibly personal information gets spilled on the boss's desk or read by the company computer jocks," Maltby says.
Though he believes Xobni ``certainly isn't the perfect system," Maltby says that if its privacy filters can prevent companies from needlessly plowing through the text of personal messages, then it is at least ``a step forward."
As for the privacy issues of companies scrutinizing employees' personal e-mailing habits, Maltby is unconcerned. He says that most bosses are aware that people send the occasional personal message and accept it.
``It could become oppressive if it's carried to an extreme, but there's nothing inherently wrong with monitoring e-mail to see if people are using their time effectively," he says.
Even with the upcoming planned release of their software, Goldstein notes that Brezina and Smith are only at the beginning of the long start-up journey.
The $12,000 they've burned through so far seems small in comparison to the $150,000 they're attempting to raise from private investors and venture capital firms. They haven't determined yet how much they'll charge businesses to use Xobni. (The individual-use version will be available free.)
Goldstein says that he is somewhat skeptical about Xobni's chances for success. The data could be useful, he says, but not vital.
``That's all interesting stuff to know, but who's going to pay for it?" he says.
Still, the idea is novel, Goldstein says, and he wouldn't write Xobni off yet.
``Two guys in a garage -- the right two guys can do wonderful things," he says. ``Apple, Google, you know the list. Perhaps there is a piece here that they have discovered."
