Email is down? Head to the cloud
Wednesday, July 20th, 2011 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor“My email is down.”
I hate seeing that; knowing the feeling in my stomach of possibly losing years of communication, reports and ideas. My colleague had sent that out to the team. However, she followed it up with, “so I will be sending email through my Yahoo mail until it’s fixed.”
She didn’t miss a beat. The Cloud to the rescue.
This link, shared by our CEO called Coming to Terms with the Consumerization of IT by R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO at Constellation Research Group, gave some simple strategies for IT to follow in looking for solutions, based on consumer applications that users are more and more familiar with. He commented that the new generation of workers, most likely mobile workers, are hit with “…a one-third productivity tax on the newly entered workforce — because workers have to hunt for information, applications inhibit collaboration…”
In our upcoming Mobile Workforce Report, 54% of mobile workers reported that they are much more productive and 56% reported being much more efficient when they have flexibility in when and where they work. Having access to data, through carefully vetted cloud-based applications, promotes this added productivity for the lucky enterprise. With more work happening on smartphones and tablets, cloud-based applications such as notetaking, email, document editing, web conferencing, etc, are adding to that ability to work anytime and anyplace.
Another article by Dan Tynan of Infoworld, 10 hard truths IT must learn to accept, Nathan Clevenger, author of “iPad in the Enterprise” (Wiley, 2011), says the iPhone and iPad are the catalysts for the consumerization of IT. “Unless IT supports the devices and technologies users demand, the users will simply go around IT and use personal tech for business purposes.”
Or, as mentioned in the HBR article, systems must be easy to use. If they “break,” such as email goes down, business can’t stop. Any many workers will head to the Cloud.
Photo by craigmdennis CC2.0
Tags: enterprise mobility, mobile workforce
