Data Management Insights – Meet Mr. Clutter

Featured article by Beerud Sheth, CEO & Founder, Teamchat

Have you met Mr. Clutter? He works at your firm. Well, works is probably not the right word. But he’s there—pervasively—and has the greatest impact on your company, more than any other employee by far.

Mr. Clutter floods you with innumerable emails, text messages, alerts and notifications. He knows every one of your email addresses and mobile numbers and will inundate each of those inboxes. You can run, but you can’t hide from Clutter.

He’s the maharajah of meaningless messages. He has a seemingly unending supply of messages and is indiscriminate about sending them to anyone. In an odd way, he means well. The messages are at least a little relevant, or at least he thought so—or at least to someone close to you—or perhaps he wants to message you something you cared about at some point in time. He sometimes thinks it’s something you might be interested in sometime in the future—or something you could be persuaded to like.

Mr. C loves games and puzzles. His favorite is the treasure hunt. If you’re looking for some information, he’ll convert it into a hunt. When you’re looking for an aggregate view of team activity, say, total sales for the day, he will bring you dozens of individual numbers. He won’t help you sort through multiple versions submitted by your colleagues. When you’re looking for the latest status on something, he’ll make you go through hell (the whole list) including every intermediate status report as well. When you’re trying to deep dive into a specific topic, Mr. Clutter will make you wade through unrelated topics. Like a military drill sergeant, he will shower you with distractions while you attempt to focus on a specific activity.

He’s a never-ending presence in our nonstop lives.

Mr. Clutter slows down time. Organizations move slower. Approvals take longer. Decisions get delayed. To-do items slip through the cracks. Projects get delayed—often abandoned due to Clutter. His power is like gravity; it pulls everything down. Einstein would have been intrigued by him.

Mr. Clutter is hard to get rid of. You can’t fire him. The bigger the company, the more powerful Clutter gets. His power grows in proportion to the square of the firm’s size. It’s maddening!

So, who’s going to tame the exponentially growing, gravity-exerting, time bending, omnipresent, deeply entrenched, ill-humored, unmanageable Mr. Clutter?

Well, let me tell you who. One day, as Mr. Clutter was roaming along, doing his thing, he met the lovely Ms. Teamchat. Ms. Teamchat had the exact opposite personality. She is organized, structured and smart. She knows how to aggregate messages into the right executive summary. She knows sales figures have to be aggregated, vote counts have to be totaled and feedback ratings have to be averaged. Ms. Teamchat is keenly aware that forms have to be tabulated by fields. She can survey a team and get you results instantly. She can assign checklists to each person and track when tasks are done. She can instantly gather nominations from employees (e.g., pick employee of the month).

She’s the queen of quick questions. She can answer or get answered almost any question instantly. She is meticulously organized. She knows what goes where – everything in its place and a place for everything. Even as Ms. Teamchat displays the executive summary, she’ll pull up the drilldown details at a moment’s notice. Messages are neatly organized by topic so if you’re looking for a related topic, no other one will distract you!

Ms. Teamchat is magical, super-efficient, clear-headed, insightful, friendly, and above all she just wants to make you look good. It’s her job.

She also has a powerful network of friends who enhance her powers. If critical messages need to be routed elsewhere, her friends tell her where. If priority alerts must get to managers, Ms. T’s friends tell her when. If critical actions haven’t been done, her friends remind “certain” individuals. A time for everything and everything in its time.

So what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Mr. Clutter’s horribleness was indeed no match for Ms. Teamchat’s beauty. She wouldn’t budge an inch. Persecuted teams tired of tyrannical Clutter celebrated in joy and welcomed Ms. Teamchat with warm hugs.

And the organization lived happily ever after.

Beerud Sheth, CEO & Founder, Teamchat

Beerud Sheth is the Co-Founder and CEO of Teamchat, a free mobile messenger built to eliminate the clutter caused by email and simplify corporate communications. Sheth is responsible for the overall strategy, execution and growth of Teamchat.  He is also the Co-Founder of Webaroo Inc. and serves as its Chief Executive Officer, and is the CEO of Webaroo Technology (India) Ltd. Prior to Webaroo, Sheth founded Elance, the world’s largest online services marketplace.  Prior to founding Elance, he worked in the financial services industry – modeling, structuring and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and Citicorp Securities. Sheth earned an M.S. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology & a B.Tech in Computer Science IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal.