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Paul Williamson from Deloitte »Waterstons' managing director, Mike Waterston comments on the changing world of communications:
My varied experience in business over the past 30 years has seen a major transformation in people’s ability to communicate, share ideas and learn from each other.
In the early eighties I was the technical manager of a large chemical enterprise with manufacturing sites in eight countries. We ran a very successful coordinated manufacturing development programme which in those days, before the cheap PC and email, required many telephone calls and a lot of travel to meetings where participants could compare and share ideas. Work duplication was rife and the process of shared learning was difficult and inefficient. The result was slow if steady progress and the overall exercise was relatively costly to run. I often reflect on how different things would have been if the same exercise had been carried out today with the current green agenda and with access to modern communications tools.
For a start VoIP telephony and email would have massively reduced the cost of one-to-one communications and make sharing documents and written ideas straight forward and efficient. An international and accessible extranet would have meant that people could access a shared repository of key documents and technical papers. In addition workers in multiple continents could easily pool ideas and work on joint projects and papers without fear of duplication. A local seminar on a key piece of development could have been streamed over the internet to every manufacturing location and the remote attendants of the seminar could ask questions of the presenter using unified communications to clarify ideas and share learning.
The individual worker at his desk could, at a glance, having seen that his project team compatriot in another country was at his desk, engage him in an immediate text based, audio or video conference. If during the exchange the view of another member of the team was required his availability could also be ascertained and if the system indicated that he or she were at their desk they could be added to the video or audio conference at will. One can’t help thinking that the whole exercise would have been immeasurably more efficient and effective and life would have been easier and more productive for the participants.
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