MS vs. my company

Just some brainstorms.

  1. We don’t eat our own dogfood. We push embedded wireless devices and Voice over IP, and yet we stick our people with cheap 4-year old cellphones and use a plain ol’ PBX to route calls.
  2. We don’t have a progressive technology plan. Half the organization uses WindowsNT. The other half uses Windows 2000. Some enjoy local administrator rights to their PCs, others don’t even get CD-ROM drives in their computers. Some are standardized on Outlook XP and IE6, some have Outlook 98 and IE5, and the rest of the company waddles on with Netscape Communicator 4.7. Office versions range from Office 95 to XP.
  3. We don’t stay current. Users are actually discouraged from using Windows Update. Some users are still using NT4 SP3 and Netscape 4.7. This caused many PCs to bite the dust when the Blaster worm made its rounds.
  4. We don’t maximize the potential of the tools we already have. Take how MS uses Outlook. If you are looking for someone, a receptionist can personally pull up their shared Outlook calendar and peruse their schedule. If you leave voicemail for someone, he/she can listen to it from their computers as a WAV file. Employees can check email any PC in the world with just a web browser. It’s not magic, it’s Outlook Web Access – a product Bell we currently sell as part of our Hosted Exchange business solution! Except even we don’t use it (see #1).
  5. Perhaps before we ask for more, we give some more. Imagine if we offered free snacks and beverages to their employees. Expensive, you say? But if a $1 can of Coke makes an employee work longer, harder and happier on any given day, wouldn’t you say it’s worth it?
  6. We make it hard for people to stay in touch. Salespeople typically carry around a cellphone *and* a pager, and play phone tag with their office phone. In London, we cannot even forward out office phones to our cellphones. We don’t use PrimeLine or SimRing. Most people don’t have their mobile numbers published in the employee directory. We lack a form of realtime communication – workers are not encouraged to use SMS or instant messaging. This translates to long lead times and mistakes – you leave an email or voicemail, and hope that the guy heard you right and calls you back before the end of the week.
  7. We don’t shout out own name loud enough. A building’s lobby should have a big colourful Sympatico High Speed Internet access kiosk and an ExpressVu driven TV set. Salespeople should be given the latest Mobility gizmos to give our products free public exposure. We should be giving out free Sympatico dialup CDs and QuickChange calling cards. Managed routers and other networking equipment should be given big, bright Bell Managed Solutions branded stickers, not scribbled-on tiny white Avery labels.