Every two minutes two million e-mails are sent, 1,157 YouTube videos are viewed,
11,000 songs are downloaded, and 2 new blog sites are created. Those are just
a few of the activities going on via the Internet. E-mail has evolved to become a
mission-critical application as essential as electricity or telephone service. In fact,
according to a META Group survey, 80 percent of corporate e-mail users believe
that e-mail is far more valuable than telephone for business communications. Today,
90 percent of corporate communication is driven by e-mail.
In the 20+ years that I have been working on the implementation of technology into
other people’s businesses I have seen just about every level of implementation and
network design and configuration that you can imagine. I’ve worked on networks for
major carriers, foreign government, Fortune 500 companies, and 10 person firms.
Organizations from multi-billion dollar corporations to the community church
have in common that they rely entirely on their e-mail, web access, and computer
applications every moment of the working day. Any company that is going to compete
and thrive in this world is going to do so through the effective use of technology. The
optimal word is effective.
When they cannot effectively use the computer, I’ve observed, most employees chat
with other employees and accomplish little or nothing. As a small business owner,
when I see idle people in a business I can’t help but think about the cost of all that
idleness. In the ultra-competitive business world, the ability to leverage every hour
of every worker’s time for maximum productivity is essential to the very survival
of an organization. Business managers and owners go to great lengths to leverage
employees’ time. There are startling statistics that show that the technology in most
of these companies doesn’t work a frightening percentage of the time.