by Guido Marchetti, MJ Flood Technology.
In the modern age every aspect of our lives is competing for our time, which is becoming more and more scarce as we move forward. Being productive, focused and informed within your business can be a challenge at times.
I meet with companies and clients who are still struggling with this daily. Modern technologies are making individuals more efficient, at least those who understand how to use the technology. But how can you make this expand across your business? I watched a video lately Drawing the Future on the WSJ site which was the CEO of Slack discussing this very topic, and he hit the nail on the head in the second part. It comes down to an alignment of direction. What does that mean?? It’s simple, show everyone in your company the direction you wish to move towards, and then empower them with tools that enable productivity.
I give clients the same message when we are discussing how to embrace modern productivity tools. I focus on the business use cases because without a relevance to end-user productivity tools can just end up confusing people and making noise in their day. Choosing how you wish to work as a company will also have a profound effect. In the video you will have seen people who are individuals using tools like email to share information with certain people, this habit is so old, yet still widely used. Tools Like Slack, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Team really do have the potential to end internal email chatter and misuse, but only if you embrace them.
While I am aware of Slack and Hangouts I don’t use them, I do however use Teams as an Office365 user its free for me, and as a Microsoft Partner, well it just should be done really. But how it has started to make my life easier and better is profound, I hate when a colleague emails me something they wish to collaborate on now, I want them to go into teams. I have a few small teams I work from and the good news is that my mailbox is full of client related stuff, and not stuffed with internal noise.
My collaboration is now focused and on Point, I can centrally see, edit and comment on content quickly and effectively. I can have a conference call within the app, and its available on all my devices. I have even brought other applications into the App. It’s becoming my one pane of glass and quickly becoming more valuable to me than email. The future of collaboration for me lies in these type of services, Microsoft previewed their meeting room of the future at Build this week see here https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/7/17327596/microsoft-meeting-room-demo-build-2018 This will use teams specific hardware and AI to enrich actual meetings in real time, but you can see the reliance on a centralized data store that all team members have access too.
