InformationWeek

June 7, 1999

Secret CIO:
Be Clear--Or Be Deleted

E-mail and the Web are great ways for vendors to reach an audience-but obtuse and overblown prose quickly wastes the opportunity.

By Herbert W. Lovelace

ife used to be simple. I would walk into my office in the morning, sigh in the direction of the big pile of mail in my in-basket, and do what I could to reduce it before my first meeting of the day. Then came voice mail and the need to decide whether to check my messages first or start immediately digging into the unsightly pile of paper cluttering my otherwise pristine desk.

With the ubiquity of global E-mail over the Internet, complexity has increased further. Now when I take off my jacket, I am faced with the choice of which of three intrusions upon my existence to attack first--voice, electronic, or paper mail. Regardless of my selection, I can expect a common thread to run through the missives in all three media: everyone in the world wants to tell me about the wonderful products they have to solve problems that we never knew we had in our enterprise.

Vendors are taking every opportunity (except, perhaps, fliers stuffed under the windshield wipers on my car) to trumpet the virtue of their wares. They are arguably most persistent with E-mail. The Bible tells of 10 plagues being visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus. We have three modern ones that I know of on the Internet: porn, get-rich-quick schemes, and computer vendor news releases.

The E-mails that I get about porn sites are my own fault. When I first got these messages, I would indignantly respond, demanding to be removed from their mailing list. It took me a while to realize that all I was stupidly accomplishing was notifying the purveyors of porn that the E-mail address they had randomly hit was live.

The next nuisance class, get-rich-quick schemes (Make Money on the Net!), were sort of fun to read until I realized that it's individuals who are probably desperate for extra income who are taken in by that kind of nonsense.

The computer vendor news releases are another story. It's sad. There's no question that marketers of software and hardware products have a difficult time reaching the people who make the buying decisions--and some of the stuff they're hawking is potentially useful. The Internet is a great tool for communicating to potential buyers, and the beauty of an E-mail is that the unit cost to reach people is very low. Even better, if readers are interested in your product, a simple mouse click on your embedded URL brings them to your home page, where they can get information to their hearts' content.

It's a shame that this golden opportunity is wasted with puerile product announcements and news releases. The poor vendors don't seem to understand that their prose is so obtuse and overblown that we have little idea as to what their wares really do. Just what is an enterprise solution? Or a key metric analyzer? Vendors need to be brief and clear. Clarity is even more important on the Web than in a pretty brochure. Tell us what your product really does, and--who knows?--if you build something useful, CIOs may beat a path to your door.

I suppose I could set up filters to stop most of this detritus, but that would require me running the risk of deleting something I might want. Besides, I want to inflict personal retribution for the violation of my most precious commodity--my time. In the Old West, a fast trigger finger and unerring aim were crucial to survival of the fittest. When the offending E-mail messages cross my screen, I do a quick assessment of the situation, my eyes squinting ever so slightly in the mode that I learned from more than one TV cowboy show. Then, with lightning speed and faultless direction, I connect with the Delete key, and relegate the message to the trash bin of history, where it belongs.

Works every time.

Herbert W. Lovelace is the CIO at a multibillion-dollar international company. Herb practices his day job under an alias and has changed the names of colleagues to protect the guilty. Send him E-mail at lovelace@home.com. He'll provide real answers--and whimsical comments--to your questions on InformationWeek Online at www.informationweek.com.