About CJ
During twenty years in the Pharmaceutical industry, I was involved in early roll-outs of email, and office software - starting with persuading secretaries to give up the typewriters that they had built careers on by developing specialist skills.
Since then I have been involved in many projects to replace paper processes with electronic processes that offer so much opportunity for the future. I've worked with the NHS on the roll-out of their national email system - one of the largest single systems in the world, and with Scottish public bodies attempting to introduce paperless or paper-light offices.
Throughout all of this a pattern has emerged of over optimistic managers expecting that technology could be bought that would solve their business problems. Although there have been no complete failures, the technology has frequently not quite met their high expectations and the reason for this easy to see.
Technology is just a tool that has to be applied to business processes. To make good use of the tool, the process owners need to understand its capabilities, and limitations, and then set out a strategy for its application to support the new processes. For example, I have yet to work in an organisation where the managers have produced a written strategy for the use of email - there is an assumption that if each individual is trained in all of the aspects of the tool somehow a process will develop by itself!
Of course this doesn't happen and what we see are individuals with various approaches to managing their personal communications, and I have seen evidence of some people who just can't cope with this. The addition of Blackberry and similar devices just increases the pressure on those who can't cope. The result is organisational chaos.
The good news is that it doesn't have to be like that!