Michael Fevyer, our Sales Manager, put together a piece for a newsletter recently and it struck a chord so I thought it was worth repeating it here.
So here we are, allegedly well into the information age and we’re now at a stage when we have a more general view of what’s happening to us and how it is affecting us moving forward. Much like our great (great) grandparents before us viewed electricity or commercial flights. You can obviously say electricity was always there, much like information, but its how we use the information that affects the way we do business and run our lives.
In the meetings we have with our clients it still advertises to me how far we’ve come in such a short period of time. Take the solicitor firm we’ve recently met, they were still having to send their inter office legal documents by courier at the end of each day. Not only can they now send that same information electronically to the required solicitor, to his desk, but also whilst he’s at court (via his IPad). This could mean the difference to the end user (in this case the defendant) of winning the case. And of course we also have to take into account the amount of paper NOT used in this process; can you put a price on this?
Or to the retailer who still had their store managers sending, by fax, at the end of day, takings and stock reports. Although we are part of the solution (the retailer in question took a SaaS/cloud solution) meant that it saved the store manager and the accounts guys (at head office) time to concentrate on the real job of saving or making money.
Even how we communicate within our own office or clients has changed. If I wanted a face to face meeting with our Network Operation Centre I would have to spend an hour commuting to them. Have the meeting and then spend another hour coming back. Now I get to stare at a TV screen with them at the other end and discuss any issues they may have. This goes the same with many of our clients.
Remember before the information age I would have to send my newsletter to our clients, at the cost of the paper, envelope, stamp and time. All this has been changed by the information age. Same goes for electricity, although the original advantage of it was to replace candles or gas lighting it provided time to do more (there’s not allot you can do with the lights off…..work related).
The flip side of this however means that it’s easier to manoeuvre the information. Ten years ago, most people had not heard of spamming, blogs, twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia or even Wikileaks but look at how it effects our daily lives now.
It’s easy to forget that the time it takes for a piece of information to get from A to B used to take a whole lot longer back in our great grandparents day.
Indeed the speed at which information is propagated and disseminated has increased substantially which in itself is remarkable.
Of course the flip side is this speed and relative ease of communicating can have adverse effects if due diligence isn’t taken…
More fool the individual who sends a message in the ‘heat of the moment’ whether by IM, Text, e-mail or tweet….Online presence is something that in days gone by didn’t exist, nowadays it’s something that needs proper consideration.