John Linton
I attended a 'breakfast' meeting today as the guest speaker to a group of medium sized business senior executives on how to use internet 'technology' to improve your survival chances in 2009. There were a little over 30 attendees and the 'meeting' was arranged by one of the large accounting firms and, very tastefully, hosted at one of Sydney's nicer harbour side restaurants - so it wasn't a major imposition to attend - for me at least.
I spoke for a little under 40 minutes and my address was based on a questionnaire I had handed out as the attendees arrived and which they could either fill out, or not, as I made my points. I based my address, and therefore the questionnaire, on two aspects of using the internet:
1) VoIP
2) Automating customer/potential customer contacts
On a show of hands less than one third of the attendees were using VoIP in their businesses and of the ones that were using it none were using VoIP beyond the simple outbound call reduction cost basis - half of whom were not totally satisfied with what they had achieved in either savings or quality.
As I went through the most basic uses of internet to 'sell' services, take orders, provide order status feedback and then provide support and assistance, checking by show of hands how many companies attending used these elementary functions the number of companies who did fell from 100% that had a web site and then approximately halved as I talked about each successive function to zero for the last three 'layers' of web automation.
My 'presentation' was based on using the Exetel web site and User Facilities and Forums to illustrate the web usage functions and a loud speaker phone to demonstrate the VoIP functions and, especially, the call quality. The reactions were quite extraordinary - by the end of the presentation I felt like David Copperfield in a Las Vegas theatre pulling off one amazing illusion after another - so new to almost everyone present (including the host accounting firm personnel) were the simple things I showed them over less than 40 minutes.
I got a great deal of pleasure from, apparently, opening the eyes of so many 'senior executives' to what I would think most people in the communications industry would regard as quite prosaic and 'old hat' uses of web based process automation and the simpler aspects of Asterisx VoIP PABXs - but that was, apparently, not the case for the attendees or for, according to the accounting firm, the vast majority of medium to medium/large businesses who are their clients.
My last question was what a company should pay for a fast company internet service and I gave some examples (on the screen) of Exetel's Ethernet pricing. The overwhelming response was that no-one attending the breakfast knew which provider they used or how much they paid for either their internet or, for those that used it, their VoIP.
I closed the presentation by saying that what I had showed them of Exetel's web and VoIP automation currently saved Exetel around $A100,000 a month in opex but was only possible if the CEO was continually involved over a period of at least 2 - 3 years in the processes of deciding what should be done or at least gave his authority to allowing the changes that automation requires to be made. I also said that we were actually using more resources today to further automate our systems than we had ever used since we started the process some five years ago. As the event was running very late there was no time for meeting the attendees individually, even for a few moments - something for which I was grateful.
As I drove away from the venue I thought about what this meant, if anything, in terms of how business is done in Australia (or at least Sydney) today. I didn't come to any conclusion other than to think that nothing seems to have changed in the use of technology in many Australian companies since I first sold a computer more than 40 years ago - the CEO isn't really interested and makes some generic/money based budget decisions and then leaves it to his "IT Department".
I couldn't help thinking that maybe it's only some, from what I've seen certainly not all, communications companies that really effectively use the products and services we base our revenue plans on?