In the ever changing cut and thrust world of big business there
is an increasing need to keep up to date with technology to ensure you aren’t
left lagging behind your competitors. As the tools we need to complete everyday
tasks improve around us, the importance of keeping up to date with them all
increases as the time and cost savings they can provide in the long term should
be taken advantage of as soon as it’s economically viable to do so. Business
practises that may have been the norm ten or twenty years ago can seem entirely
archaic today. Processes that may once have taken teams of people a week to
complete might today be entirely automated by machines capable of calculations
at speeds that are unfathomable to our brains.
So with the need to keep up with technology greater than
ever before in order to achieve business success, here are some key bits of kit
that the modern office environment could never do without.
Integrated Digital Telephone System
It was only a few decades ago when your average medium to
large sized office required full time switchboard staff in order to process
both inbound and outbound telephone calls as well as those within the
organisation. Analogue phone systems were a complex maze of copper wires,
switches and multi digit extension numbers that necessitated trained
switchboard staff, technicians and regular maintenance.
Fast forward to today and office telephone systems are a
completely different ball game. Fully integrated digital telephone networks
enable organisations with multiple sites worldwide, workforces in the tens of
thousands and 24 hour operational needs to communicate effectively and
efficiently, with minimal cost. Consider that a properly configured VoIP telecoms system can operate entirely online, meaning there’s no need to pay per
minute of talk time, and you don’t need to be Donald Trump to recognise the
savings to a large organisation can be phenomenal.
Technology for Remote and Mobile Working
At first there was the desktop PC, speeding up all manner of
everyday office processes, then came the laptop, enabling those on the move to
take their work with them. Some years later saw the advent of PDAs (personal
digital assistants) and Smartphones, allowing even greater flexibility and
portability to fast paced execs in the field. And today we’ve seen PDAs give
way to the booming tablet market which has completely infiltrated the home as
well as the office right the way across the western world.
The advent of the laptop/notebook and its ultimately falling
into a price bracket so as to be accessible to even lower band employees
revolutionised the effectiveness of those in the field such as salespeople, or
anyone with a need to work offsite. And as this technology evolved to become
cheaper and more portable, the ease with which a large organisation could make
demands of their staff no matter where they were meant a significant increase
in availability of core operations and those integral to them. Later came the
PDA, offering much of the functionality of a laptop but in an even more
portable format, as well as the Smartphone which today is so prolific in both
the office and the home that anyone without such a device is seen as a luddite.
The current fad is for tablets, which bridge the gap between
smartphone and laptop, allowing an improved user experience over the smartphone
without requiring the space and power demands of a traditional laptop. Still a
relatively new phenomenon the tablet has found its way into businesses across
all sectors and can perform functions as simple as taking orders in a
restaurant to being utilised as a mobile shop window in remote off site
situations.
Digital Wireless Telephone Headsets
The humble headset is no new phenomenon, but its evolution from
unwieldy tangled-wire hands free facilitator to the sleek and efficient
lightweight wireless digital units of today has been an important one. It might
sound obvious but being freed up to go wire free has opened up countless
avenues of opportunity in the modern office environment. No longer a slave to
your desk and chair, today’s executive go getter has the freedom to take and
make calls from wherever he or she pleases.
Consider the Plantronics CS540 wireless headset, which offers as much as seven hours of continuous talktime
off a single charge and works as far as 350 feet from its base station. It may
seem a technology we take for granted now, just like smartphones and laptops,
but the flexibility a wireless headset provides really is a modern marvel that
truly revolutionised the working environment it now dominates.
From the sales floor to the boardroom, lightweight wireless
headsets have become ubiquitous in modern work spaces, and with good reason. We’ve
become conditioned to loath being tied down, whether to inflexible working
practises or physically being tied to a piece of equipment, such as your trusty
desk phone. Give your staff that freedom to roam and you’ve given them a reason
to stretch their legs as well as their creativity.
Of course there are countless technologies that aid today’s working
environment, and some which have come and gone (remember the fax machine?), but
the three above stand out as true landmarks in bringing the business world to
where it is today. And for that they should be saluted!
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