Archive for February, 2011

Do not disturb! Doctors’ visit in progress!

Posted on February 22nd, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

If you have any experience with hospitals (and who doesn’t, unfortunately?) you know of the “Doctors’ visit” ritual. Once or twice a day a procession of the attending doctors go from room to room in a ward, followed by nurses and a cart that once had all the patients’ paper files and these days may have a computer on it instead. It is a solemn affair, and the patients and their families hold their breaths as they await the experts’ verdict regarding the situation of this patient or that. Meanwhile other people are kept out of the  ward – the.. Read more

Atos Origin aiming to become email-free!

Posted on February 15th, 2011 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

Impressive news from France: last week Mr. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos Origin (a 49,000 employee global IT Services company) has announced that the company aims to be email-free in three years. More impressive is the fact that this is evidently not just talk; Mr. Breton, speaking to the press, has justified this decision with an insightful set of observations, which in turn are grounded in hard data collected by the company and others. He also reports that his company has been implementing new tools that will eventually replace email for internal communications, notably collaboration and social networking platforms. I’ve.. Read more

Zero benefit email – come and get it!

Posted on February 10th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I received a letter (yes, on paper) from Audible.com. I am a happy customer of their audio book service; I pay a fixed modest sum monthly, and receive one “credit” each month, which embodies the right to download one book into my iPod. Their letter tried to sell me on the idea of getting onto their “Email Network”. In other words, grant them permission to send me promotional emails. I can’t complain – they were kind (and law abiding) enough to ask my permission, after all. But I read the letter and was struck by one of the “benefits” they.. Read more

Slower or faster? Email vs. Voice

Posted on February 4th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

When I was a ham radio operator, I could communicate with far away hobbyists using either Voice transmission or Morse Code. You’d think Voice would be the faster means of conversation; after all, the spoken word is faster than the dots and dashes of even the fastest telegraph operator. And yet both modes had their charm – and both took about the same time, because with Morse, we’d use abbreviations and keep the conversation focused and terse in a way not necessary with the luxury of voice. Thus, the question of which mode is faster was far from settled… The.. Read more