Social Media: the perfect production killers
Submitted by Hans van Nes on Fri, 18/02/2011 - 17:00
No, I'm not a new media dinosaur. I use the internet heavily, think LinkedIn is a really useful business tool, I love my iPad and are generally seen as a "gadget man". Thus why a blog with this title? Well because I think we're heading for a another dotcom breakdown: the hashcom hype.
The average teenager in the western hemisphere seems to spend about 10 hours a day net on phones, SMS, tweets, Hyves, YouTube and what have you. At least from my observation, seeing them texting in class, riding a bike during a group call and video chatting in between. No, it's not scientific but apart from sleeping, standing in the shower and the odd physical activity that's all what they seem to do. The kids would probably depict me as alien from the planet Neanderthal straight away (or just as "old"). When did I have my first mobile phone? 1993? Sent my first email? 1994? Not even 20 years ahead we are over-flooded with "stuff". I wouldn't call it information, since most of it is spam in whatever form. Why bother? Well, I see the information garbage as a serious killer of business productivity.
One step back: what did email for our business? Initially a lot of good. No printing and copying documents anymore, no unpredictable snail mail which took for ages, no time zone limitations, blindingly fast and rather reliable. Than somebody invented the CC en BCC; that's where it went wrong. If not at least 3 people CC'ed, you were not visible, covered or trustworthy.
Then came along the Attachments: o so handy to share that PowerPoint; in four versions and received as "To" and again in five as forwarded. And to make your sysadmin happy: also stored on your hard disk because your email quota was reached (I almost killed a sysadmin when he set a limit on m y mailbox).
Then things really started to get out of hand: training courses on how to manage your email traffic, corporate guidelines on mail behavior and if you were very lucky: automatic generated emails with status information about every transaction in the operational systems. But thanks to your supreme being of choice for inventing the Email Free Friday.
The latest cry: last week Getronics announced that within 2 years from now they will have resolved the email problem completely by replacing email with social media solutions. Yes, it was presented as a serious item by a senior executive. So IT is getting it wrong again: replace technology with technology without resolving the real issues. So by the time the teenagers of today are flooding the offices of our leading corporations, we have all goodies in place to get a seamless transition from playground to payground and then be surprised that our productivity is lagging.
Why not address the essence of the problem: the over complicated organizations with non-empowered employees and to many management layers. More than enough resources to run checks but not nearly enough capacity to manage. Weird idea: talk to the customer instead of updating your many bosses, peers and colleagues with non-relevant CC's.
And yeah, I'm getting old(er) but don't necessarily regard the old days as better. Maybe a bit slower and less crowded but just as intense and more rewarding. My tip: when I was flooded with daily emails I took the advice from a wise person: don't read any mail unless you are one of the maximum three persons in the To-section. You will be surprised.
As always, comment welcomed.
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