I recently had a short article published in Health Manager (July 2007 Issue), the quarterly publication from the Health Managment Institute of Ireland - a professional body for those involved in Health Care Management in the Republic of Ireland.
In the end, I may have veered from the intended brief which was to picture what technology could do for managers over say the next 10 years; wittingly or unwittingly, I actually moved the timeline back - and considered the changes that have occurred over the last 10 years.
The article text follows:
Online tools make it easier to communicate and share information, says Kevin Peyton
If you were to ask any healthcare manager what has brought the biggest change to communication in the workplace over the last 10 years - undoubtedly the top three would be the mobile phone, email and the Internet.
It’s difficult to remember at this point how you explained yourself on arriving to a meeting late – now we just ring ahead and say we have been delayed; What about those struggles with a fax machine? – Now we just attach and press send; And when was the last time that you actually visited a travel agent to book an airline ticket?
Just as a level of comfort was descending on how we use email and the web as an integral part of our daily working lives, along come the geeks again with clever ideas, seeming limitless quantities of caffeine based drinks, and a tireless pursuit of the next big Internet thing - think YouTube, MySpace and Wikipedia.
Often referred to as Social Media (online content created by users), the underpinnings of these services – what’s under the bonnet - are now becoming established in many enterprises as key mechanisms of communication among staff.
Take the technology known as a Wiki which is behind Wikipedia - the online encylopedia whose contributors and editors are the public. They can add or modify content very easily within the web browser. In fact, this ability to easily modify web pages was part of the original web-browser developed by Tim Berners-Lee back in the early 1990’s.
Interestingly, Berners-Lee has more recently stated that his concept of this “read-write” web is more akin to blogging. A blog is a website where diary-like entries are displayed in reverse chronological order, a bit like in MySpace. The author can associate single-word descriptions to these entries. Others can comment on what is being written. Debate and discussion often ensue.
MySpace aside – and it’s probably not such a good example in this context - organisations are now using blogs to promote debate and discussion around topics which are important to them.
Of course, now that we are getting to the stage where broadband is beginning to be viewed as a commodity rather than a luxury, the prospect of being able to consume video and audio online is also now a reality.
Traditional broadcasters have been doing this for years (I saw the attack on the Twin Towers online before seeing it on Television), but now the medium is available for a wider community of content creators.
What might these technologies mean for a Health Manager? The key change could be a move from being a passive reader of the intranet to being an active creator of content on that same intranet.
While the majority of intranet content will still go through a process of publication using a Content Management System, there is a lot of information and knowledge out there that could be suitably shared using tools like Wikis and Blogs. Ease of use is the key element here; Login in, update the site, Log out.
For example, take those emails and their attachments that you CC to all of your work colleagues. Instead, what about sharing this information on a web page, where it could be improved and added to over time, or alternatively commented on, discussed and referred to.
And let’s not forget the humble mobile phone that we mentioned at the start of this piece. A new service called Twitter, allows users to send text messages to a UK number. These can then be distributed like a group text, to those that have been invited to, or who have shown interest in receiving them. Twitter also makes these musings available on the web, and these can be incorporated easily into an existing web page or blog.
In fact, the Twitter service epitomises this move to easy-to-use tools for website updates...and just when you thought it was safe to switch off that grey box on your desk…
