Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

I did a very brief seminar this a.m. on “Technology tools - are you using them or are they abusing you?” Brief for three reasons: 1. The agenda; 2. The fact I’m not a super techie geek; and 3. There’s no way anybody can cover everything for everybody when it comes to technology. VPN, LANs, MANs, SANs, WI-Fi, WIMax, FDDI, FDDI-II, T-1, T-3, Ethernet, 802.3, 802.6, Token Ring, DSL, ADSL, blogging, vlogging, podcasting, RSS, POTS, PSTN, VoIP, bla-bla-bla…to make it even more confusing the same acronyms and abbreviations mean different things depending on whether you’re talking analog or digital, voice or data.

The bottom line for all of us (techie and otherwise) is technology of any type should be an enabler - not an inhibitor. And, if the process is broken to start with, automating it is just going to make the problem worse. For example, the lost art of filing and cross referencing - although manual - actually worked, and we weren’t at the mercy of the Microsoft gremlins.

So, if you’ve got an accounting, operations, customer service, or other process that isn’t working - I always recommend sitting down with some old fashioned pencil and paper and laying everything out - and including the people who actually have to do whatever in the process. After all, it’s GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) - regardless of the technology.