GUEST
ARTICLE - Jan Sampson
Association
Toy or Tool?
Our Blackberry
Experience
Patience pays off! The Institute of
Chartered Accountants of British Columbia waited for
technology to truly make the job easier before joining
the PDA movement in a big way.
Last summer we found what we had been
waiting for. The perfect portable assistant. The new
Blackberry combines all the attributes we wanted:
all synchronized with our office computers
all the time.
Earlier PDAs required connection to the
computer to actually synchronize...which is a nuisance.
They also didn't necessarily give you access to your full
inbox or contact list.
With our Blackberries, we have access to
every phone number, email address and address that we have
in our Microsoft Outlook contacts. So it is simple to use
those numbers and addresses.
Another real benefit of this portable
office is the ability to use those otherwise lost minutes.
Now we can check our e-mails, and respond and delete, all
during the taxi ride to the airport or while waiting to be
shown into someone's office.
Richard Rees, our CEO, travels
extensively, both touring the province meeting our
members, as well as trips to meet with our provincial and
national peers. No longer does he arrive back in the
office to an overflowing electronic inbox - he has
typically had enough time in the taxis to deal with all
his e-mails.
We have been asked if the
ability to check e-mails all the time makes it
harder to leave work behind - diminishing the
relaxation of time away from the office. The
answer is no. We can choose not to open the
emails and check them. Or we can choose
to stay in touch with little effort - making
the time less stressful if you do need to stay
in touch.
Several of our senior staff attended the
CSAE conference in October in Victoria. We were
particularly pleased to be there, as some urgent matters
had arisen causing us to consider canceling attendance. We
realized that the real time connectivity of the
Blackberries would allow us to interact with the staff in
the office and deal with the matters as the e-mails
arrived, right from the conference. So we were able to
attend the conference and deal with the urgent matters
easily.
With the connectivity software
(Blackberry Enterprise Server), the fully on
line, real time version of the Blackberry is
more costly than the simpler PDA, but it has
increased our productivity - a real win for
us.
The Technical Details:
Jan Sampson is Director of Internal Operations with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of British Columbia (ICABC) in Vancouver BC.
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