It starts at the top (by Corey Smith)
Another guest post by a good friend and author, Corey Smith, mastermind behind the business and technology blog, masterthebusiness.com. In his spare time, Corey has also founded several companies to include Resumango and TributeMedia as well as being the Chief Web Architect for Dealer Marketing Systems and Editor-in-Chief at Office Product News. I do hope you enjoy reading this post as much as I did.
Change is not easy to implement in an organization. People are resistant to change. The fact is, much of what we try improve with change fails. Not because that the change is bad, but because we don’t make sure the change itself succeeds.
If you are the lone wolf crying in the office, then don’t expect any of the change you want to implement to happen. The only way for change to work is if it starts from the top down. If the boss doesn’t care about what you are trying to accomplish, it simply won’t happen.
I find it interesting when IT departments implement some new technology and then wonder why it doesn’t work. More often than not, the business leaders in the organization don’t want to make any change, so the new technology simply falls on deaf ears.
If you are going to push for any change in your organization, make sure the boss is on board or be prepared to fail.
Corey Smith’s business and technology blog provides a common sense approach to running your business. He also maintains a news feed service for the copier, printer and document management industries.
To Archive or No: Ponderings of an e-mail Junky
Let’s be honest here. You are all pack-rats with your e-mail, aren’t you? If you are reading this you probably have an affinity for technology. And that being the case, you probably spend a good bit of time in e-mail. Let’s face it, e-mail is a wonderful tool to help communicate with a lot of people often and keep track of things in writing.
I just took a look at my work account and I sent roughly 3200 e-mails in 60 days. That’s an average of 53/54 e-mails every day (including weekends). And let me tell you, I don’t always write very short e-mails…
I typically receive anywhere between 80-120 e-mails every day, just in my work account mind you, and this generates a lot of work and communication.
In our environment we use [tag]Outlook[/tag] with an [tag]Exchange[/tag] back-end. This is very convenient for a lot of reasons and offers some wonderful collaboration tools. Everybody that’s anybody integrates with Exchange and/or Outlook.
Let me tell you though, from a network administrator’s position, Exchange can be a real bear. About 18 months ago we had to conduct an emergency migration to another exchange server. That was 28 hours of pure agony as we watched many 2 GB mailboxes move 1 item at a time. It took ALL night to move 70 e-mail boxes.
That’s when I started thinking about tools that would help me groom the exchange database, called the [tag]Information Store[/tag] (IS) and increase the ability to search e-mails as Outlook’s built in search feature is pretty weak.
I began scouring sources, and found a strong candidate - EMC’s [tag]e-mail Xtender[/tag]. I kept on searching, but there didn’t seem to be anything else in the market - at least not for the SMB. So I began the long process of working with a partner company, asking questions, viewing demos, and trying to ascertain if the solution would be a good fit.
The price tag started at $5000, and then quickly went to $10,000 after some discovery - and ended around $20,000 for what we were really trying to accomplish. I found that I had to fill out lengthy technical surveys and even have EMC approve the installation.
All of this for 68 mailboxes?
I began shaking my head… I needed something to make my life easier - not more complex. Exchange with Outlook and [tag]PST[/tag] files was bad enough, but the pain of that wasn’t enough to bring us to spend that amount of money and more importantly time… With more than 5 major projects going on already, and a slew of minor ones, I just couldn’t stomach a 2-3 month roll-out.
So for now, we will continue to be pack-rats and continue with the way we do business until something comes along that can knock my socks off. For now, as much as I hate to admit it, I am going back to the old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
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ChangeForge... a catalyst to affect the paradigm by Ken Stewart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.changeforge.com. -
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