by: Marvin O. Ayende
At 7AM in the head office, Carly, the Vice President, walks into her office and immediately turns her laptop computer on. While sipping coffee, she goes through her e-mails and starts working on each of them. She surfs through the companys website to check for new announcements and her navigation leads her to a sales monitoring site where she quickly spots branches with significant change in daily sales. After sending an e-mail message requesting for a meeting with the branches, her screen pops up a reminder of another meeting an hour away.
At a later time, in one of the companys branches down south, Jerry, a customer service associate, opens the branch and starts the computer. He connects to the companys network and in a moment, he is pre-occupied reading e-mails for the branch. Seeing a company-wide memo to be kept on file for his co-employees to see, he downloads it. He fires up his internet browser and, in an instant; he begins to accept customers and encodes the data in the point-of-sale system. After a couple of hours, he consolidates his transactions and sends his data just in time for the branchs cut-off.
The two scenarios above depict a typical day for employees in the future. Carly and Jerry know the importance of accuracy in data. Jerry makes sure that his data get to the head office on time. He handles the data just like how he satisfactorily handles customers who flock to his branch. Carly is aware that without Jerrys data, she can never paint an accurate picture of the companys sales performance. Thus, she constantly visits the sales monitoring site to identify which branches need to be e-mailed for their data submission.
Three years ago, when the companys computerization program went full blast, nobody realized the sweeping value of electronic mail. Now that e-mail is ubiquitous in the company, there is an avenue where anyone can voice out and exchange concerns, reactions or ideas. As if it is not enough, everyone can take advantage of its natural benefits e-mail is cheaper and faster than letters (snail mails), less intrusive than phone calls and clearer than fax. Using e-mail, differences in location and time zone is a thing of the past.
Few people know that an electrical engineer turned programmer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail message; QWERTYUIOP. Tomlinson actually picked @ as the locator symbol in electronic addresses, which has been used ever since. Although at first his messaging system was not thought to have great significance, he never expected that he continues to affect peoples lives and businesses about thirty years later.
Just imagine the future without e-mail. Carly would use official memo (with a letterhead) to notify employees for a policy change in the company, phone call to set up a meeting with a co-employee in another team, make a mail-it to communicate with affiliate offices overseas, or set a face-to-face meeting to inform associates of a change in job responsibilities. It only takes a simple e-mail to actually do the job.
In hindsight, e-mail has become an important tool in peoples lives just like the lives of Carly and Jerry, or our lives in the future. So go ahead, log in and check if youve got e-mail!
Marvin O. Ayende is the site owner, author and webmaster of http://www.ayendeph.com. He works as an IT professional in a conglomerate with headquarters in the Philippines. His string of estimable achievements in IT are associated with programming, systems analysis, database organization, networking, security, technical support, data center operations, project management, documentation and implementation.
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