Keep your company address book healthy, wealthy and wise

David M Williams
Monday, 21 March 2011 19:51

Opinion and Analysis

Is your GAL, AD or LDAP address book fully populated? Does it contain position titles, street addresses, phone, fax and mobile numbers? If not, you fail one of my yardsticks for a quality systems administrator and you are missing out on recognition from your executive management. Here is why.

I strive to set high standards for myself in my own personal goals of making IT the backbone of the company I work for. I have developed various habits and measures which I now consider a minimum standard in corporate IT.

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?