London Regional ICT Champion

It was almost a month ago that I launched the ‘Great Web Office Experiment. The aim was to discover if it was practical to stop using desktop software such as Outlook, Word and Excel and instead use only online tools to do the same jobs.

My orginal hypothesis was:
Online tools have the potential to enable organisations to more easily exploit ICT and better achieve their organisational goals. However, most of the UK voluntary sector has not yet grasped how they can use online tools to connect with their stakeholders. Online tools can be applied to everyday tasks like email, calendar, documents and spreadsheets and replace desktop applications.

You can read about the tools used in the experiement here.

Well, the results are now in and the edited highlights from experiment are:

• Online tools have the potential to free organisations from the traditional complexity of ICT decisions.
• Online tools can also help very small organisations (such as those working from Internet cafes) with basic business tasks such as email, calendar, contacts and documents.
• Organisations that grasp the opportunities of new online tools will prosper as they’ll be the ones getting their story heard by funders

However,

• Organisations can be reluctant to use ICT differently; and more examples are needed to show what can be done with online tools.
• It’s difficult to pick the right web tool for the right business task, especially when some but not all of these online tools can integrate with each other and/or synchronise with software such as Outlook.
• Sustainability – chose carefully as the sustainability of online tools is difficult to gauge, given that some of these tools could disappear from the Internet at any time. Make sure you have a disaster recovery plan.
• Security – issues around entrusting your organisations’s data to a third party like Google or Microsoft still remain to be resolved
  

Online tools have the potential to enable organisations to more easily exploit ICT and better achieve their organisational goals. However, most of the UK voluntary sector has not yet grasped how they can use online tools to connect with their stakeholders. Online tools can be applied to everyday tasks like email, calendar, documents and spreadsheets and replace desktop applications.

Part Two will concentrate on reviewing the tools I used in terms of the end user experience and suitability for voluntary sector use.

Tags: Google, googleapps, thinkfree, zoho