Your fourth interview

Kathy Duncan has been a long time friend. You've known her since your first day at High School. You and she work in different fields and have never worked together. But she does work in a field that she interacts with people often in her day-to-day function. You are over at her place for dinner and you start by telling her a little about your need to collect the information and the conversation continues from there…

Kathy: Well, I don't know if this will help you or not but I can tell you how I keep track of similar information on people that I work with all the time. They aren't my customers but I think the information is similar enough. Now, I'll tell you right up front that this is Kathy's way and it might not be the right cup of tea for everyone.

You: Ok. Spill the beans.

Kathy: In our office we use Outlook as our e-mail client. And what e-mail client do you use?

You: We don't use Outlook anymore. The CIO office said something about security and overhead since it didn't want to work with our server or something. All I know is right now we use something other than Outlook.

Kathy: Well, you don't need Outlook. I guess you can use just about any personal information manager (PIM) software or any software that has PIM capabilities.

Kathy looks off for a minute or two.

If you can get with your CIO office and find out if they have some other PIM software or if your current e-mail client has a PIM capability then my approach might be helpful.

You: That would be ok if I understood what PIM really is.

Kathy: Well, PIM software or PIM functions really is a way of managing contacts. In Outlook you have an Address Book. If you are using something like Thunderbird (a free e-mail client) then they also have an Address Book, they just handle it differently than the way Outlook does it. And there are even PIM packages you can get that just focus on PIM functions.

Kathy seems to feel you aren't getting it yet by the look on your face.

You see. The information that I keep on you in my Address Book is your name, your phone number, e-mail address, fax number (not that I use it all that often), the company you are with right now, and your picture. Now, the full term of PIM could include other functions, but for now we are talking about the capabilities of keeping this information in some type of system that has the ability of search and indexing.

And Outlook Address Book gives me that and more. For example right out of the box I can keep about 35 different bits of information about a person. And since all of the information falls into fields in a data structure then you have some type of control on the information that goes into that field. For example I can't enter letters when I am entering in your phone number. And your e-mail address must include the @ symbol when I enter it. So this way you have a little control on the data that is being entered about the person. And since you have the pre-defined fields you have an easier way to search and index the different people in your Address Book or PIM implementation. For example I can sort the people in my Address Book by their last name, nickname, the company they work for, etc.

You: Ok. I think I can see how that might help out. But is this something that everyone in the office has access to or are you the only one who can see your Address Book?

Kathy: Well, the way our CIO shop has us setup I am the only one that can see my Address Book. And while I don't know all of the options and ways that things can be setup it is my understanding that the way we are setup is the generic way that Outlook is setup. And because of this it is hard for anyone else to know about the people I work with. But in my office that's fine. We don't need to share all of our contacts. As a matter of fact some of my contacts wouldn't deal with some of my co-workers even if they had the right information. And that's why I'm not sure if this will work for you.

I'd say get with your CIO shop and find out what PIM option that they could support in your company and then look to see if any option would help you or not.

I like my Address Book. Not only can I easily find people in multiple ways but I can also print my information in a couple of default formats and I also can take the information with me.

Kathy points to the new cell phone sitting over by her purse.

I just tell my phone to sync with my Outlook and all of my contact info gets transferred over.

The conversation continues on along different paths so you stop your recorder.

Now you can go ahead and look at a summary of lessons learned from your Kathy interview.