Category Archives for "The Challenge"

Social Productivity and Information

Several years ago, McKinsey & Company studied how well companies used social technologies to help raise the productivity of high-skill knowledge workers.  The realm was untapped, McKinsey said, and concluded that:

If social technologies were properly harnessed in a way to help business workers deal with information, they could raise productivity by 25% and could contribute up to $1.3 trillion dollars worth of value to US companies.

It never happened.  Entire categories of new tools were developed, but not one of them combined social technology, information, and connectivity.  The number of workers who must deal with complex information in the workplace has risen, but no tools have been developed that focus on collaboration and sharing of connected information.  Until now.  

Why not?

It turns out that supporting business information is very difficult.  Business information comes in all shapes and sizes, and is consumed and distributed by all different sorts of people.  In the past, many companies invested in big, corporation-wide information systems. Other companies set up systems that were full of rules, and hired managers to make sure that workers were being consistent.  But that’s not what workers are looking for today.

Today’s workers spend their off-hours involved in sophisticated communication and information-sharing activities, with state-of-the-art tools.  They aren’t afraid to use their consumer tools in the workplace — and they don’t hesitate to ask for the types of functions that they get from their consumer tools.

Memphis offers a powerful solution for business information that fits the modern worker’s needs and working patterns.

Life Has Changed

Hey! Where’s your phone?  

Because nobody in today’s world is ever without their telephone.







Is This You?

Picture this:

You start a project.  Your team members are smart, experienced, and love information.  Together they share tons of links, and lots of messages, ideas, and documents. They love podcasts and videos,   The team thrives in today’s digital world.

You start working together.  

What tool do you use?

One team member starts with Word documents, but everyone else wants to move to Google docs.  Pretty soon, there are 50 different documents and a dozen nested folders in Google Drive.  

Someone used Quip at their last job. Or maybe Airtable would be better? And the designers keep everything in Dropbox. 

Of course you use team messaging.  People attach documents to messages, but you can never find them again.  Which channel are you working in? Who put it up? Which version? 

Some of the people on your team are prolific and they overwhelm everyone with the flow of new ideas. They create a “New-Ideas” Trello board, but most people click “All Caught Up” without reading it. One team member tries to get everyone to use Workflowy, but the team doesn’t like it.

Quick:  how is your project doing?

Where’s your most important information? What are you collaborating on right now? And where are the comments and input that you most need to see?

We are all these people.  We love information, and being productive.  We know all sorts of tools, and we use them well.  We’re great communicators and highly competent. But we all agree on one thing:

Managing information should be easier.

Wouldn’t it be nice if our tools all worked together? Wouldn’t it be nice if we had one place, where everything came together seamlessly and we could just do business?

That’s why we created Memphis.