Conference 7.286::digital

This one's a bit off beat, but I once worked for company where the President
enjoyed sending inspirational messages to the troops.  He equally enjoyed
getting such messages.  Vaxnotes could be a great medium for such dialogue.

It would also be well used for policy updates and clarifications.  

When I worked at Polaroid people loved a feature in the company's paper where
employees submitted questions to the corporate officers (It was called Interact
or Dialogue or something like that).  The paper selected and printed some
questions and answers.  Digital has a similar feature in U.S, Field News.
VAXnotes could be used quite easily like this. 

Mark 

    Most executives at that level get involved in task force type efforts
    which last for a few days to months.  I have used VAXnotes for
    providing a forum for these temporary project activities.  It is
    a great medium where information must be distributed to everyone
    on the task force.  Beats the heck out of having a distribution
    list and using electronic mail.
    
    I'm not sure that this is the place for your request, by the way.
    You might want to check the VAXNOTES conference.  I recall that
    there is also a conference for discussing personal uses of VAXnotes.
    
    Good luck,
    
    Don

    
  Many executives have "hot flashes" of inspiration or ideas and then
    pass them in chance meetings with their staff or subordinates. 
    Notes could facilitate the "chanceness" of these meetings and allow
    the exec to drop his flashes in a quick, informal forum, and then
    be able to follow them up at a later time by simply viewing the
    Unseen topics in his conferences.  This is much quicker, and avoids
    dictating or jotting notes to be typed, or waiting until he runs
    into the person he wants to give the idea to.  His staff/subordinates
    could check the "Hot Box" conference daily for action items.  It
    would also serve to keep his staff/subordinates up to date on what
    everyone else isdoing and, just as importantly, what is "hot with
    the boss".

I hate to put a wet blanket on this, but

	Senior executives rarely type anything.

While there may be exceptions (and may be both types present when you make
your presentation), be sure you take into account that some will expect their
secretaries to do the input and provide them with hard copy (and filtered)
replies.

/john

    John, what you said about senior executives not typing is true,
    but I believe it's changing.  We had a situation where the top man
    at our largest OA account not only was "above" typing, but also
    had a very eccentric problem with noise, ANY noise.  His office
    is TOTALLY noise-proofed, his phone is muffled so you can barely
    hear it, and when his door is shut  it is TOTALLY silent.  He wouldn't
    even put up with the whoosh of the air conditioning thru the vent
    in his office.
    
    Terminals don't really make noise, you say?  Well, this guy has EARS!
    The idea of putting a terminal in his office was a joke, and for a long
    time no one even suggested it.  He fully supported our ALL-IN-1
    program, and willingly provided the funds, but had his secretary read
    and write his mail.  Well, one day out of the clear blue, he asked if a
    terminal could be noise-proofed.  Good ol' CSS came to the rescue, and
    now the guy has a VT241 in his office (no printer, that would have been
    too much to hope for!), and does his own mail, calendar, etc.
    
    While no one has specifically asked him, I believe he found he was
    sitting in his office watching the world go by and missing it. 
    Everyone but him was so ENTHRALLED with this new office automation,
    there must be something to it.  An executive at that level usually
    is somewhat open to new ideas, or he wouldn't be where he is --
    not always true but usually.  It is SLOWLY becoming a status symbol
    to have a terminal on your desk.  I think technology is making
    progress, however slow!
    
    						Pat 

    I appreciate the difficulty that was made about senior executives
    doing their own typing. It occurs to me, however, that the power
    of Vaxnotes isn't totally compromised if the executive's secretary
    does the typing for him-----in fact, to a lesser extent than DECmail.
    How do you feel about this?

    I don't think you could *reasonably* use this idea.  If I were a
    "Senior Executive", I'd try to get a conference like this started
    (not under my auspices, of course) and then listen in.  I think
    that this conference in particular, but also a couple of others,
    gives a reasonably clear and unfiltered view of the concerns and
    aspirations and ??? of the employee body and the general health
    of the company.  It's probably MUCH better than a report filtered
    through N layers of management could ever hope to be. :^)
    
    Bill

    I agree with the earlier comment that executives rarely type anything,
    but my experience in the consulting world before joining Digital
    also leads me to conclude that there are exceptions and that there
    will be more and more of them.  For example, in doing some initial
    needs analysis work at Citibank's Canadian head office, one of the
    questions we placed on a survey asked whether the respondents could
    type more than 10-20 WPM and whether they would be willing to use
    a terminal with a keyboard.  The vast majority of respondents had
    a very respectable typing speed and virtually all said they would
    use a terminal.  The survey respondents were a cross-section of
    all levels in the organization, but with a heavier sampling of
    management, right up to and including the President.
    This type of response will become more and more prevalent as the
    ranks of management become increasingly filled with people who have
    learned to type in order to prepare presentable papers in college,
    or more to the point, with people who have graduated from the
    increasing number of schools which require that students have their
    own PC.
    
    However, there are (at least) two other factors to consider in relation
    to executive use of VAXnotes.  The system needs to reasonably easy
    to use, considering the experience and working style of the user.
     I submit that VAXnotes falls far short of the mark in this respect
    when we're talking about executives.  VAXnotes is reasonably good
    for people who have a technical orientation, as many do in Digital,
    but would be very discouraging for the average non-technical office
    worker, let alone executive.  Of course, providing training on the
    system would go some way to alleviate this problem (does anyone
    get trained on VAXnotes???), but good hard look at the interface
    in comparison to how the target user works, by some people who know
    a few things about office work and human factors, would really be
    in order.
    
    Of most importance, however, is the _perceived_ value to the user.
    It has been proven many times in OA implementations that the most
    inexperienced user will climb mountains to learn and use even the
    most arcane system, if s/he sees that it will deliver real value.
    The best example of this is Visicalc, which sold thousands of Apples
    at a point in the evolution of PC's where both the hardware and
    software were extremely difficult to learn and use for a non-technical
    person.  But thousands of pencil and paper oriented accountants
    perservered and learned how to use Visicalc because they saw that
    it allowed them to entirely new kinds of things which could
    significantly increase their revenues.
    
    So the real question is:  what would VAXnotes do for a CEO?  Although
    a few answers have been suggested to this already, we must keep
    in mind whether these suggestions would be perceived as valuable
    as we might think, from the CEO's perspective, and how one would
    get a CEO to sit down in front of VAXnotes' less-than-intuitive
    interface to actually experience these benefits.
    

	Another possiblibity:  Distributed decision making.  Most executives
of major corporations end up traveling quite a bit to attend meeting and
other conferences.  While people like to travel, it usually gets a little
old after a while.  Executives in a large, distributed corporation could
use VAXNotes as a discussion/conference/decision making tool.  Get a hold
of a good (nonproprietary) notes file that illustrates lots of discussions,
ideas, etc. (and shows people comming to a consensus) and give them a demo
how it works.  One big advantage to VAXNotes over things like teleconferening
is that all the individuals involved don't have to participate at the same
time, they can look at others ideas and think about them for a while.  But
unlike paper mail the discussion process doesn't take too long.  You can
get read good results in a day or so.
						/Skip