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| Welcome to the New |
September 13, 2003 |
By Peter Wolchak
New Backbone:The Backbone you hold today is a new and improved version. We have updated our look with a cleaner and more readable font, mixed in more charts and short news pieces, and brought new writers and illustrators on board.
And we’ve also updated our editorial focus somewhat, a move reflected in our new tagline: Business Technology Lifestyle. There was a time—only a short while ago—when business technology existed as a distinct unit—backoffice processes that powered the actual front-office work.
That’s no longer true. Business technology is everywhere: it’s the cellphone the CEO uses for conference calls, the wireless personal digital assistant (PDA) that delivers inventory database updates to a field service rep, the handheld scanner couriers use to track worldwide shipments, and the tablet PCs doctors use to update patient records.
Some believe e-business has had its run and is now a done deal. Nothing could be further from the truth—the examples above prove that. Nor is e-business a separate process anymore. It is, in fact, the way much business is now done. The technology we use has become ubiquitous, part of the lifestyle of both work and home.
And Backbone is set to give you the news and views you need on this new lifestyle.
New normal: As 50 million people in Ontario and the U.S. can attest, what we thought of as normal has to be rethought. At the time of writing, Ontario residents and businesses were still faced with the threat of rolling blackouts due to the massive power outage that occurred in August. And the economic toll of those hours without power hadn’t yet been calculated.
Part of the new normal is reassessing how much trust your business places in the public power grid, and then taking a fresh look at your disaster and continuity plans.
According to Osama Arafat, CEO of Q9 Networks, an Internet infrastructure and hosting provider in Toronto, many companies were surprised at how poorly their emergency plans functioned.
“A lot of people thought they had good backup power plans, but they did not envision the power being off for so long, and what they had wasn’t sufficient,” he said. “Very few people actually simulate and walk through these types of disasters. But many more people now realize the possibility of an extended power outage is a real one.”
New lifestyle:We’ve all heard about the digital lifestyle—new mobile devices which make it easier to stay on top of work and improve our efficiency, thereby giving us more time for the important things in life.
Preparing this issue gave me an excuse to work with various mobile technologies. Executives who do a lot of meetings should check out a Tablet PC. I tried a Fujitsu slate model, which means it has no built-in keyboard. Most user input comes through the big touch screen, but coupled with Fujitsu’s wireless keyboard docking station it also doubles as a desktop PC.
Tablets are excellent for taking notes and carrying files on the go, especially when loaded with Microsoft’s currently-inbeta Onenote software.
I’ve also been getting in on the cellular revolution with a nifty little Samsung phone from Bell Mobility. It does voice and voicemail, of course, so I stayed in touch with the office during a recent camping trip. But it also offers up a calendar application, text messaging and a mobile browser that delivers news, weather and stock information, games, movie listings, a location-based find-me service and even mobile dating.
Using a Toshiba PDA I scheduled appointments, accessed names and numbers, and read lots of e-books.
And, since I had 20 minutes with nothing to do, I decided my home office needed a wireless network. Using a kit from Microsoft and a Toshiba notebook I had the system up and running in 18 minutes. And now I wonder how I got along without it.
So does all this stuff change the way we work and live?
For many it already has, and the rest of us will catch up. It’s not all perfect and it’s certainly not cheap, but it’s simply too useful to ignore.
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