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February 16, 2012

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Brian, Good Point and well presented. While we haven't outsourced, we have near sourced and as a CIO I haven't put as much weight to the perspective you share here. Thanks for raising this important topic and communicating it well.

Thanks for bringing up this topic Brian. I'd be curious what your thoughts are on the never ending challenge of trying to make communication more efficient in an era where more people are tele-commuting?

The employees at the company I work for are all remote. We make extensive use of email, instant messaging and just recently video chat (Google Huddle and GoToMeeting HD Faces).

Hope to see you at WMCPA! Maybe we can chat over a beer or something.

AaronBartell.com

Thank you Nigel and Aaron for the kind words.
As I said earlier, there is no substitution for face to face communication. Then again, the flexibility of telecommuting has made IT a lot easier and opportunistic.
We tried Yammer for a few weeks here at MGF after it was recommended to us by another local business. For those who don’t know, Yammer is kind of like facebook, except it can be purchased to use over a private network and is more geared for business. Since we all work out of the same department, and already use Lotus Notes and Sametime we decided Yammer was not for us. However, I believe it would work much better for IT staff that telecommutes as in your case Aaron. Even better would be to use Google Plus with the video chat and integrated email. There is a third party Google Apps company called Cloudbakers out of Chicago that did a presentation for the WMCPA back in December, and I was impressed by the services and level of integration they offered for email, documents and collaboration. A lot of that can be offered just using Google apps, but there are added benefits like domain names, extra storage space and more security if when you go with Cloudbakers. In my opinion, a good social network for business should offer:
• A general stream or activity feed
• Video, voice and type chat
• Private messages
• Document collaboration
• A generous amount of storage and security
• Text alerts

That’s the next best thing to face time. Am I asking for too much?

Brian:

Good to see another post from you. You are spot on with this topic. I have recently dealt with some IT people that do not have a clue how to communicate, with users or colleagues. It makes for a difficult road.

Being able to translate between "tech-talk" and English is an important skill. Of course, I've also had to ask more than one user to translate their emails into English, but that is another story.

Written and oral communication is critical to meeting business needs. Nicely done!

See you at the WMCPA Conference! (Aaron, too...)

I completely agree - the ability to communicate effectively and clearly is extremely important. It helps one to teach others, sell what you're doing, understand what others want from you, and explain technology among other things.

Brian,

Mitch from Cloudbakers will be presenting again @ the Spring WMCPA conference in the event others wish to see what the benefits of Google Apps are in relation to using with our IBM i shops.

In addition I will be presenting how to send your IBM i data to Google Apps for use, whether that be data sharing, report distribution or even publishing a calendar to share with your customers, no matter who those customer can be defined as...

The best is that Mitch has agreed to co-host our 2 sessions with me and a lab we will be having, so, the goal is to get the message out of how we can leverage Google Apps for our companies.

See you there....

David

Actually, I will be attending RPG/DB2 Summit this year. We do a rotation at Masters Gallery, so this year Al and Steve will be at the WMCPA Spring Conference. Be sure to stop and say hi to both of them, and for those of you going to RPG/DB2, I will see you there.

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