Paper, Telephones and the Digital World
My supervisor will be challenging our group shortly to work an entire week strictly using the B2E tools. The good news is that since we are the group responsible for the tools, we should be using them. The bad news is that not everyone we will have contact with will be using the tools.
The other day I went into a meeting and was greeted with paper. Just an FYI, paper does not fall in the B2E tools category. In fact, any more, I am not sure why anyone would need to print anything for a meeting since we 1) have projectors, and 2) have Live Meeting which we can share our screens to anyone. This is like when word processing moved from the typewriter to the computer and some of the administrative assistants would still type and white-out the documents. Can you even buy white-out any more?
I digress...as the technology continues to evolve, there are still people that stay with paper and using the telephone. Even though Office Communicator has not only the ability to make voice calls, but video calls, people will still pick up the desk telephone and call the other person to leave a voice mail message. Do I think the telephone is a complete waste? No. It has it's place for incoming and outgoing non-company calls. But as for internal calls, I feel it should just sit on the cradle.
Now to contradict myself...I use the phone for internal calls. It is just sometimes easier to pick up the phone to ask a question and get an immediate answer. I won't try to have a long conference call, providing people with sweating ears, but for a quick conversation, why not? And with the telephone not ringing nearly as much as the past, it has become a bit of a differentiator. Compare this to snail mail vs. email. In the past email was a novelty, now it is a part of everyday life and spam has people skimming their mailbox instead of reading the email. Yes, it is much cheaper than snail mail, but think about it. When you get a real letter in the snail mail now, do you automatically want to read it...whereas in the past you would skim the mail and move on?
Technology changes perception. In these cases, it is good to use the perception to your advantage.
The other day I went into a meeting and was greeted with paper. Just an FYI, paper does not fall in the B2E tools category. In fact, any more, I am not sure why anyone would need to print anything for a meeting since we 1) have projectors, and 2) have Live Meeting which we can share our screens to anyone. This is like when word processing moved from the typewriter to the computer and some of the administrative assistants would still type and white-out the documents. Can you even buy white-out any more?
I digress...as the technology continues to evolve, there are still people that stay with paper and using the telephone. Even though Office Communicator has not only the ability to make voice calls, but video calls, people will still pick up the desk telephone and call the other person to leave a voice mail message. Do I think the telephone is a complete waste? No. It has it's place for incoming and outgoing non-company calls. But as for internal calls, I feel it should just sit on the cradle.
Now to contradict myself...I use the phone for internal calls. It is just sometimes easier to pick up the phone to ask a question and get an immediate answer. I won't try to have a long conference call, providing people with sweating ears, but for a quick conversation, why not? And with the telephone not ringing nearly as much as the past, it has become a bit of a differentiator. Compare this to snail mail vs. email. In the past email was a novelty, now it is a part of everyday life and spam has people skimming their mailbox instead of reading the email. Yes, it is much cheaper than snail mail, but think about it. When you get a real letter in the snail mail now, do you automatically want to read it...whereas in the past you would skim the mail and move on?
Technology changes perception. In these cases, it is good to use the perception to your advantage.
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