By Dr. Martin M. Lwanga
For Obama this was an absurd, if not ridiculous way of doing things. It was also very costly. Take the case of a manager traveling the whole day just to attend a meeting at head office. The organization had not only to foot the transport bill but also meet accommodation cost.
One day an up- country manager while traveling down to attend such a meeting was involved in a traffic accident as his saloon car attempted to doge a gigantic pot- hole. Fortunately, the officer survived. Upon being released from hospital after three weeks on bed, Obama, decided to take the matter to his top management with a request to revisit the way there were doing things.
“As you know we had an officer who was involved in an accident because he was traveling down here for a meeting,” he pointed out to his senior managers. “My question is why he had to travel when a meeting could have been held through tele-conferencing or if not by video- conferencing. All those facilities are around us or offered somewhere in town.”
“Sir, his presence was needed for the meeting to proceed,” responded one senior manager.
“That I cannot dispute,” Obama went on. “But my concern is why managers here don’t use modern means of communication and prefer to stick to old and outdated forms. Take the example of the way paper is used here. I am shocked. Everything has to be typed, streams of copies run and sent to as many people as one thinks of. Why are documents not sent on the intranet and copied to all officers instead of typing hard copies!”
“Because some people don’t read mail on the LAN,” argued an officer. “The hard copies especially if they go with a signing book are proof that the officer received the mail.”
“Give me a break!” Obama waved away the argument with growing impatience. “One can easily programme to show when a mail arrived in a certain mailbox and was read. If some of our officers are claiming that when official messages are sent there are not on their desk still such can be routed to their phones as text messages. The technology is there. There is certainly no good reason why a modern organization should be using as much paper as I see here. It is total waste.”
“Are you saying that we should desist from using paper?” asked one young curious manager.
“Exactly so,” Obama responded firmly. “You see the world has moved on. As far as I see none of you should be coming to meetings with those heavy folders with all paper in there when each of you has a lap- top. Everything should have been digitized. Someone should be taking notes on a lap- top, taking corrections there and if we have to check any past records we can go right in the back- up files.”
The Digital office
Like truth, all new technologies are first resisted until over time it becomes evidently clear that the idea has over riding merit and has come to stay. For example, with the arrival of mobile phones a certain type of managers chose at first to ignore them since as they claimed, “there is a phone at office and home.” Nowadays it would be considered as bordering on primitive behavior for a manager to lack a mobile phone.
The computer has also been resisted in many ways by managers for various reasons. There is a category of those who simply refused to learn speed typing preferring manual hand- written notes even as the world around them changed. For some the device was greeted with a lot of suspicion and only used when one had to. Mail sent on the net was left un read until it arrived by post.
The fact of the matter is that many of these new technologies do help improve the efficiency at the work- place. Take the case of the black berry phone and the way it helps managers on the road keep on top of things. Any grocery super- market may use the old way of receiving money and fumbling with change. But a cash – register certainly does a faster job.
Resisting new technologies
Some managers have resisted the transition into the digital age because of fear of loss of control. Take the case of a records officer in charge of all those tons of paper. By zipping them down into mere gigabytes it means anyone can access information at the push of the button. Suddenly all the self- importance of sorting out paper disappears.
For such they will resist change to the very end. But managers who want to take these organizations into the digital age will have to use a set of interventions like providing new tools such as Lap top computers, black berry phones and training officers how to use them with back up support.
Sometime managers will have to be more radical. Indeed, one such manager adopted a policy that only with special permission had one to type paper more than five pages. As well he would refuse to read and send back any communication he received in hard form insisting it be sent back in soft form. Gradually staff adjusted and today when one visits this organization there is hardly any trace of paper around.
Question:
Identify the new forms of communication that Joint Medical Stores should capitalize on?
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