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One of these is a fully-populated address book. Whether you refer to yours as the Global Address List (GAL), Active Directory (AD) or some form of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) service, in my view if it is not the master source of truth for company contact details then a systems administrator is deficient in his or her duty.
You may vehemently disagree but I strongly believe my viewpoint has been developed by many years of working in enterprise IT, from studying and questioning where IT can provide efficiencies, and from observing the impact of what I will be discussing on the mood and productivity of an organisation.
Here is where IT can show strength and value. What I am going to explain here sounds so trivial and trite on the surface but experience shows it genuinely will wow people from executives down to ground level.
What's the big deal about an address book, you ask? Consider three things: accuracy, timeliness and efficiency. I really believe this is a business issue which is simply neglected and even goes unrecognised.
Consider e-mail signatures: if it takes five minutes to set an e-mail signature (including remembering the menu option, tweaking it until it looks right, testing it) and you have 150 employees then this is a waste of 12.5 hours of company time each time it has to be refreshed.
Consider the amount of mobile staff who need to contact someone back in the office but haven't got their number handy? They need to call someone else, and ask them to advise or pass on a message. Time is consumed for two or more people.
Consider the effort put into maintaining the phone book Word or Excel document, and it is not accurate anyway?


















