Tripos IT - eNewsletter - June 2006
Office Senses
Many Years Ago a Wise Person Said ...
Something like, “The modern office is required to accept input from, and produce information in ways that use, the six senses of the business world.”
These senses are used today in ever increasing quantities and ever more dramatic and demanding ways to acquire, manage and propagate information to an ever more enquiring consumer.
Think how drab the old approaches appear against the environment we live in today:
• Compare a wireless advertisement from the fifties or sixties with the TV advertisements of today.
• Compare the gestetener stencilled notes of 1960 against the many coloured materials we are provided with today.
• Try choosing colours to paint your home from a forty years old colour chart.
• Listen to music recorded on old vinyl platters or cassette tape after listening to a quality CD or DVD.
The list goes on and on.
• Compare a two years old Web page with one which has just been refurbished.
• Compare the image on a modern LCD monitor with a 10 years old CRT model.
Enough examples. Lets look at the six senses of the modern office.
The senses
1. Unstructured data - the written word or textual, free form data.
For many of us this is the most commonly handled data format. This newsletter is an example of just such a circumstance.
Unstructured data is widely used to describe a situation, a circumstance or an object
2. Structured data - a database.
This is were data is listed in fields and records. Structured data is found in databases and spreadsheets, and is more easily searched, counted or sorted than unstructured data. If you use a telephone book, an accounting package or a hardware comparison table, you use structured data.
Structured data is used to store information about something, a record, using the values of specific attributes, a field, to compare, sort or extract particular records.
3. Visual data - graphics.
A picture is worth a thousand words. A graph can tell a story at a glance, a photograph can identify a person, a colour can be matched, a line can inform and a chart can represent a specific item and make it recognisable in an instant.
Images are being used more and more in business to do all these things, and they are getting easier and easier to produce because the software is getting cleverer and the hardware more powerful.
4. Audible data - sounds and prompts.
The modern computer lets you know when something good or bad has happened by providing an audible response. The modern, silent digital camera often has a camera shutter sound bite which is played when the shutter is fired, just so you know it has worked.
We have also embraced machine dictation, voice mail, the telephone, voice recognition and many other audible inputs.
5. Communications - e-mail, mobile phone and the office network.
This has probably been the most revolutionary change in office senses. A sense that allows us to get hold of anyone, wherever they are at whatever time of the day. We can send data from the office to a staff member, or the reverse, we can dictate a document away form the office and e-mail it to our typiste in a trice. We can even get the completed work back within minutes of it being typed and review it on out PDA or laptop computer.
We can query the world wide web on just about anything and get dozens of hits in a matter of seconds.
6. Human factors - the necessary organisation and training to make the other senses valuable to the business.
This is a much neglected facet of office productivity management. Many staff are engaged with an assumed knowledge of the in-use, line-of-business applications. Most businesses make little or no effort to involve their staff in professional development or specific training. On the job training by someone who is only just more capable than the student achieves very little.
The set up of processes and procedures is often a matter of osmosis or a carry on from whatever has been done for years.
What does all this mean?
No longer is a modern business competitive unless it actively harnesses all the office senses and makes use of them to optimise business image and performance. And you cannot do this without planning and a considerable amount of effort.
Most of our clients use the six senses individually. Few of them have planned how they might be used together to maximise the benefit to the business and promote success.
Think about PowerPoint. Does the business have a standard PowerPoint template which all pres-entations representing the enterprise will use? Should you spend some money in creating such a template which says something about your business and the people who work in it?
Think about Word. Do you have a standard layout which has been designed to suit your business and your clients? Is it easy to read?
Think about Excel. Do the graphics drawn from your spreadsheets show clearly and accurately what it is you are trying to represent?
Maybe you could deliver the same information in an electronic format with an attached voice file which would better explain what you are trying to say than just the letters or the pictures? Could you better make your point with images or sounds to draw attention to your message? Should your tables be provided to the reader in a format which enables them to be sorted, extracted or graphed by the end user?
Surely, the opportunities are legion. It will, however, take a considerable effort to change the way you work to reap the benefits you may accrue from providing stimulating information to your consumer public in a more valuable way.
Of course, in some areas of endeavour, a simple, written document without any embellishment is the only acceptable method.
So what?
We believe somewhere in every business lies an opportunity to express itself in a novel and powerful way to better achieve its business aims.
We feel every enterprise owes it to itself to look for these and to apply the full gamut of the six office senses to achieving its goals. Go on, let your hair down and your creative juices flow. It could be both rewarding and fun.
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Thank you.
Stewart Rankin Pty Ltd – ACN 007 972 901 & DL & LD Greenhough trading as
TRIPOS IT
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