My response is more tuned towards corporate/enterprise/more-than-20-person teams.
so we got salesforce for CRM, getsatisfaction/others for support, jira for project management, tons of enterprise minded apps, yet people resort to email. why? its easier to just type in an email as opposed to logging in / filling a form, and last but not the least treating notifications sent by email in same vein as a human being.
Whats pathetic is "IT" sets up these apps and does pilot program and claims success.
I believe more idiot-proof-apps, as easy as email client app shows up, lesser will be "emails"
Email is the digital successor to the memorandum, which is turn the apex of a line of written communication mechanisms dating back thousands of years.
A Sumerian boss got his reports via tablet. Phahroh via papyrus. Roosevelt via telegram. Pershing via a rolled up message tied to a bird.
Instead of futzing around with some fragile app which may or may not be designed for what I'm doing, I can send an email to nearly anyone on earth that I need to deal with.
Nobody can argue against decision making using facts. Earlier data was "pulled" (surveys, ...), now its "pushed" (social networks, comments on blogs, ...).
Latter has led to tipping the balance of amount of data thats available to make meaningful conclusions.
Lastly computing power is dirt cheap and easily accessible.
I'd say go ahead. Besides other things, it will give you a perspective on profit vs cost centers (Peter Drucker). You will be asked to control the burn rate and make choices about what produces enough value to the company.
Being a techie, I have a bias towards calling tech chops as must have for any senior role. It just get you to make much better decisions when you are in a technology business.
Another one I came across was mashape.com "A place to easily discover, manage and hack badass APIs". Few examples: NLTK, sentiment analysis, DuckDuckGo.
