mcucenter.com

I am writing this entry as a thought of how the way we work continues to evolve. My work is spread across various activities. It consist of working on my programming and software development activities, as well as my new commercial activities, which include real time communications with my new business partner who acts as an on the ground in an instant manner. Where once decisions could wait a day or two, it became a matter of a minute or two, and now, we need to act immediately.

This has many ramifications on what we call a business and what we call an office.

Five or six years ago, I was happy to come back to my office, open my connection to the Internet (and listen to the buzz and clang of the modem), and then retrieve my emails onto that computer. That computer was the backbone of my electronic communications, it also served as my fax machine and as a repository of my notes, accounting, spreadsheets, and documents. Today, various service providers such as Google and MSN offer an inexhaustible and growing amount of disc space for storing email, documents and presentations, media casting and a host of other purposes. Applications such as Google Docs (beta) allow me to create and access my documents anywhere I please, and most importantly share my documents in their live state.

Why is this important you ask? Well lets think of what this live state means. Of course, I can take my spreadsheet file and send it to you as an attachment, as well as any other type of file. But think about it, as soon as I send it, this document is subject to obsolescence because I decide that a simple change such as formatting, a different picture could be included. Any concept where documents and file have revisions is subject to the dangers that what we want to convey may not be up to date with what we present to the world.

The terminals and technology with which we engage our data is becoming less and less important. What we need is access to our information channels and our applications where and when ever we require it. With this, I can communicate with individuals and companies, access my documents and data, process my emails and my messengers from anywhere.

So, how we work changes, I allow others to share my information and update it. My business partner can suggest changes and offer product alternatives to me why he walks around technology resellers in China. I can message him with suggestions and requests for products from retailers so that we can quickly fulfill opportunities that our brand of retail fulfillment can achieve. Our Blackberrys help address communications a lot, as finding access to a terminal can be a challenge for me in Melbourne sometimes and definitely for Edmund in China. But other facets of online presence are important. Being able to directly access stock information and offerings or place requests into our shared Google spreadsheets means that a small amount of dedication to checking on changes to document states is all that is needed to ensure that everything is up to date.

It makes for easier business… The rest is not less up to accessibility and technology, and about ensuring that our business practices are more important.