Why I joined Blink and why it is the future.
I have spent most of my working life in what you’d call traditional IT. I have designed, built, deployed and upgraded desktop, server and network infrastructure on behalf of my clients for 20 years.
Collectively, over that time period, people like me spent billions of pounds of our employer’s money on IT improvements and I am more convinced than ever that we changed close to nothing.
Sure, we went from bare metal servers to virtual machines, to containerised applications whilst our networks became faster, more intelligent and went wireless but spend time with an employee at any large company today and you’ll see, their weekday IT experience is the same as it was 25 years ago.
Now, take that same person out of work and look at how their weekend experience has changed over the same time. The contrast could hardly be any greater.
At home, employees have access to a choice of world-class software to run their lives. At work, it’s the opposite story. For the first time we have more power to deliver as individuals than we do as organisations.
Almost without exception the weekday IT experience is one of clunky, fragmented software that locks data in silos. There are too many actions to take, they’re spread across too many different systems and keeping up with email is impossible. Only the most urgent items get attention.
Sharing information between enterprise apps and other people is also difficult. It’s full of friction and slows down decision making.
A recent gallup poll suggests that only 15% of the workforce worldwide is engaged. Imagine being CEO of a large organisation where only 15–20% of your staff understand your mission. That is brown-trouser time, someone’s about to come along and eat your lunch.
I joined Blink two years ago because they were one of just a handful of companies who recognised these problems and had the right team in place to do something about it. I can see Blink being used in every single corporate I’ve ever worked in and, in fact, it’s already in place in a number of them! Personally, this is hugely satisfying.
Employees use Blink because it makes their work lives much easier. They report being able to complete 80% of their daily tasks in 20% of the time.
Companies love Blink because their employees are less frustrated and more engaged. Their internal comms teams use Blink to reach everyone. It’s a fast and reliable way to communicate their vision and it’s mobile first.
The 15% engagement number is concerning, but there is a huge competitive advantage waiting to be taken up here just by tackling it before your competitors do. If you’re serious about it, and you should be, you have to look at Blink as one of the options in this space.. there are a few but Blink is the best.
I can’t see large corporates continuing to prosper without addressing engagement through comms and by meeting the expectations of their employees. It’s that simple.
Happy Blink anniversary to me 🎉
