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As a CIOs do you need to own the IT estate of your organisation? The current economy and increasing business competition is calling for a new approach to infrastructure decisions, CIOs today find themselves at a junction with regard to how they deploy resources. As organisations change their approach to markets, so CIOs may need to consider re-evaluating their infrastructure directions. Turning towards cloud computing and applications delivered as a service could well be the answer, come and join our CIO debate
Or, if you are involved in the email sector and would like to write an article on the future of email, send your thoughts to Mark Chillingworth, editor of CIO.co.uk at mark_chillingworth@idg.co.uk.
Email remains a core technology in many organisations, yet every new social media technology is said to be its replacement. CIO UK brought together Adam Gerrard, CIO of Avis Europe, the car hire giants and Chris Puttick, CIO at Oxford Archaeology to discuss the future of email. Coming from two very different organisations, one a global customer facing retail service, the other a very scientific and specialist archaeology service, the debate was bound to be interesting.
The discussion kicked off with each of the CIOs explaining where they see email going within their organisations in the near future.
“Email is a part of collaboration, but it is getting harder to manage,” Adam Gerrard of car hire firm Avis said. “How people use it is changing significantly. We employ a lot of younger people at our stations [the retail like units at airports where customers collect hire cars]. They are from Generation Y and have only grown up in a social media world and they don’t really understand why other people use email as it is not real-time enough for them. So we have introduced a Facebook type tool, and it has been really grasped by all the teams involved. Everybody is expected to do more for less in organisations, so any tool to both capture and provide access to more knowledge and more experienced people is welcomed.”
Chris Puttick at Oxford Archaeology said that his organisation is closely related to a construction firm in its demands on IT as workers are out in the field a great deal. “When I arrived we were stuck in a Microsoft desktop way of thinking. We had to stop being desktop centric and moving to everything on the web. For email we are adopting Zimbra [the VMware owned open source collaboration system that did belong to Yahoo] as it has an email tool and a powerful search engine. It makes email more fluid, it supports document management and instant messaging and even integrates with the phone system and we have forums for projects.”
Oxford Archaeology demonstrates that there are technologies available that remove email headaches and incorporate new technologies, but Puttick explains that as with all technology change, the cultural aspect is far harder than the IT.
“My warning to other CIOs is getting people to change takes ages, we introduced the first Web 2.0 elements four years ago and there are still people who refuse to use it. There is a gap, and it is not necessarily generational. The biggest pain is getting people out of the Outlook mentality, but the people who are comfortable with this kind of technology are doing five times more. “
As the discussion moved on to why email is a pain point for CIOs Gerrard of Avis said; “The volume of email means it is no longer an effective tool. There is an element of control needed.”
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