Recently, a friend asked me to talk to his son who will soon be a fresh IT graduate. His son received tempting job offers from three companies and he was kind of puzzled as to what company to choose at the start of his career.
After discussing with the young man for about ten minutes, I was a little puzzled myself, because he was not actually looking for advice, but for valid reasons not to join any of those companies.
Workers today have more communication tools to choose from than ever. That includes Unified Communications, which integrates voice, video, instant messaging, conferencing, faxing, and more – all on one platform. However, employees often receive little or no training to reap the benefits of using these innovative tools. Many organizations end up removing training from their budgets when making such large technology shifts – believing that people should inherently know how to use and why they should use these tools. But this decision to remove training and consulting can be a costly choice for enterprises, as the technology won’t be used to its fullest potential. This could increase the total implementation cost ten folds.
Now that 2015 has just started, it’s the perfect time to reflect on how Unified Communications evolved in 2014. And, as our co-founder put it, there are a lot of things to look back and even more to look for in the new year.
Photo by Harpal Singh on Unsplash
As the end of this year approaches, everyone is making retrospectives of 2014 and forecasts for 2015. I’m sure you’ve already read a thousand times how great 2015 will be for communication and collaboration. Just a few thoughts I read lately:
Can anyone deny that cloud computing has taken the world by storm? Savvy CIOs who have already adopted the cloud have been reaping the rewards of increased flexibility and scalability, faster time to market for new application deployments, and greater savings across the board. With cloud computing, all signs point to a more efficient and cost-effective technological future.
Verb Days 3 got us so hooked that we’re already missing it! The 6 teams turned the office space into the perfect collaboration environment and filled the air with their creative vibes. Jokes echoed throughout the day. There were moments of panic when an app wouldn’t work, but also ‘Eureka’ moments when obstacles were defeated. In the end, we had lots of fun and some cool ideas with big potential!
Here’s what they came up with.
The Verb Days are here!
To help you get a glimpse of what we’re up to, stay tuned to this post. We’ll be sharing updates throughout the day.
1:30 AM We proudly announce that Verb Days #3 was a blast! Each application was different and so was each team’s presentation style. Laughter often ensued, but so did critical thinking, improvement suggestions and even new ideas.
Just a couple of days left until Christmas and everyone is getting all cozy.
Not at 4PSA though! We’re tuning our focus to the maximum, because it’s Verb Days again!
Verb Days, now at its 3rd edition, is an internal hackaton that we’re hosting every year before the winter holidays. In teams including both tech and non-tech people alike, we spend a full day to create and implement an application of choice. It’s an adventurous process that involves creative thinking, sharing ideas, laughter, coffee, healthy snacks and…coding. Lots of coding!
The event lasts from early morning to midnight, but time flies fast when you’re having fun.
A couple of weeks ago, I received an invitation on Facebook to attend Hour of Code Romania. I don’t usually pay attention to such notifications, but this one was somehow different, as the name got me thinking 🙂 I know what you can do with a line of code, but what does an hour of code represent?! This was enough to trigger my curiosity, so I did a little research.
You know what they say, businesses made with passion are the ones that make a difference. It’s the case for any industry, which got us thinking: how does passion for other types of businesses differ from our passion for IT? What is it that drives others?
To explore this notion of passion, we’ve set out to learn the stories of people who are putting a shoulder to a very different wheel than ours. As of September this year, we’re thus organizing a series of monthly internal meetups called Labors of Hercules*.
