David M Williams
Monday, 06 July 2009 19:20
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 5
A case in point; when I began at that company the financial controller spent a day a month producing margin reports for the sales teams.
Sales managers would be waiting for that day to know how they performed the previous month. If costs rose and margins plummeted one week it may be up to three weeks later before anyone found out.
Early on I said I could automate that report. After all, the sales and billing figures were stored in databases and with little more than a password-protected web site, a bit of ASP.NET and a dash of SQL I constructed an intranet that gave margins for any previous week and, in fact, the current week while timesheets and invoices were still being processed and raised.
This was not difficult to produce, but the effect it had on the business has never left me. It transformed the company. It gave opportunities to proactively react to problems as they happened. It created friendly rivalry as different branches competed to outperform each other that week.
When I rolled out BlackBerry devices it struck me I didn’t even need to make people log in to the web site. I wrote a small program to work out the week’s figures and send them by e-mail each morning.
I’d named the intranet server ‘Webby’ and this morning e-mail became known as the ‘Webby wake-up call’ among staff. Now, immediately upon waking up in the morning, people knew instantly how their sales were progressing that week. It was pushed out to them without effort or action on their part.
Some guys told me they would be out drinking and when they received the e-mail they’d check their figures and knew if they could continue partying or if they had best leave and go to bed. Once again, something so simple made a huge positive effect on the company culture.
On the one hand, you could say this is true about e-mail in general or, more specifically, push e-mail in general. After all, the biggest thing about the Webby wake-up call was that it was delivered instantly to what was effectively people’s mobile phones and did not require any manual action to request it and wait for it to arrive.
Back then, the BlackBerry was the only unit that did this. Windows Mobile and any other mobile e-mail option still required user effort to invoke the e-mail application and then a period of waiting while mail came down the invisible pipe.
Microsoft did introduce push e-mail with Windows Mobile 5 and Microsoft Exchange 2003. By then, I’d upgraded the employer I’ve spoken about to BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.0 for Lotus Domino and soon changed jobs where I again administered a Lotus Notes and BlackBerry environment. I migrated this company to Microsoft Exchange 2003 and with that a switch to BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.0 for Exchange. Later, I migrated to Exchange 2007 and BES 4.1.
In this time I went from the humble BlackBerry 7230 to the 7730 (which I loved), the 7250 – a CDMA model, the 8800 and now the Bold.
Was Windows Mobile 5 enough to entice me?
