In 1986, Dekker had one pushbutton phone in the Book Editorial department. The company has made a gargantuan leap since then in its commitment to new technologies. The personal computer revolution has done more than just let each person work better, faster, and more accurately. It has leveled the playing field in a middle-sized STM publisher's daily effort to provide the finest quality publishing. How so?

1. Economy of communications

2. Proximity of resources

3. Application of human resources to technical problems

Communications

Have you ever sent a fax that didn't go through because you misdialed, the other machine ran out of paper, or it was just plain busy? I'm batting about .300 on lifetime faxing - good for baseball, but a waste of valuable work time.

The popularity of the fax is based on historical accident. Fax technology was promoted by the Japanese as a way of communicating their pictogram "alphabet." The lack of alphabetic characters had limited their ability to take advantage of earlier 20th century communication advancements, such as the telegraph and telex machines.

American business fell in love with the fax machine, as we have always been a nation of gadgeteers, and it will be hard to break the habit. E-mail via the Internet has replaced most faxing today. I predict that in five years, sending a fax will be as common as sending a telegram or telex is in 1998. How will you be able to send documents? The scanner connected to the PC has become so inexpensive in the last year, it is easy to see that it will become a standard feature in the 2000 computer. A document that you need to send will be scanned, saved as a file, and then transmitted as an e-mail attachment.

Now that we've thrown out Dekker's fax machines, let's see what e-mail has done and will do besides saving us a lot on long-distance bills. If e-mail has done nothing else, it has allowed us to communicate directly with doctors, CEOs, and other people who have traditionally had their phone calls screened and their time budgeted to the last minute. E-mail trumped the phone call when it killed once and for all the game of Phone Tag. I'm currently e-mailing physician editors in Wales, Australia, France, and Israel, with nary a busy signal or "Would you like to leave a message?" to be heard.

If you time it right, you can have a daylong conversation to any point on the globe with Internet messages taking about three minutes on a good day to get through. What I really enjoy is a send and reply overseas or to the West Coast that goes back and forth a half-dozen times in a single day. You get the productivity of a four-hour phone call with none of the problems, such as not having all the answers at your fingertips. You get more accomplished in little time bursts spread over the day than in one long phone call with a lot of loose ends requiring several followups.

Mastering e-mail should be a top priority of any company in training new employees. It's one of those items that allow the middle-sized company to be as good as or superior to the merge-maniacal monoliths that lumber over the STM landscape.

Resources

Several Dekker editors have set up websites for books in development. They use their own websites as a resource for contributors to download formatting instructions and to distribute information, such as the table of contents and the deadline for manuscript submission. Anyone, publisher or silversmith, can do this. The knowledge base and the information routing possibilities that exist on the Internet have leveled the field for everyone and not just in business. From looking up the spelling of exotic Croatian Universities to finding the address of a doctor on the East side, the Web is a good business habit.

The Intranet concept is predicted to rival the Internet as a revolutionary agent in transforming office life. Imagine a website that contained all the things you wished you could access but need to make a phone call to find out. For example, all your documents from word processing could be one mouse-click away on a Dekker Intranet. No more clunky paper request forms. Or the vacation schedule, benefits booklets, art logs, production schedules, accounting tables, shipping dates, DHL rates. It's all possible today. Dekker has set up shared directories on network drives, but we're still constrained by the 8-character universe of file names in the effort to look up files. Lengthy file names are possible in Windows 95 as IS continues to upgrade everyone. The Public Folders in e-mail are a tentative step in that direction.

The most successful company will be the one that effectively communicates in the office and out-of-house - that takes advantage of the economical resources available to all. The next generation of authors, editors, and vendors we deal with will expect no less. This leads to the most important Dekker resource - people.

People

I recently had the occasion to congratulate Dekker editor Dr. Ken Walters (Dermal Absorption, May 1998) on his prowess in communications. In our first e-mail contact, he forewarned me that he had no technical skills at the computer and that I would have to bear with him. My reply was, "Well, you sent this message, so that shows something." He replied that he simply typed it out and pressed a button. The secret to it all is that that's all there is to it. This new technology was not passed on by an alien culture but was created by people to be used by people. As the rising tide raises all boats, so too will the tide of knowledge raise skill levels. A recent study reported that a mere three months was all that was need for the average employee to be fully trained and competent on new software.

Jimmy Carter was the first former President to type his memoirs in the early 1980s. The author/editor-typed book is not new, but it is becoming more common. Here is an opportunity for Dekker to excel. Guidance to authors ranges from minimal to quite detailed in helping an author or editor shape a manuscript into camera-ready pages that meet Dekker formatting specifications. Authors have been sending samples as e-mail attachments using our template disk, and we have been able to critique and send back the samples via e-mail. The latest version of Microsoft Word, Word97 (Word 8.0) offers great features such as annotations and multicolored highlighting that make marked up paper copies as dead as the fax machine. Here is another chance for Dekker to offer more to our authors, offering our experience plus timely technical guidance.

New technology empowers us to be the best at our jobs. The best accountant is no longer the one who went to the biggest school and works for a Big Three accounting firm. It's the accountant who masters the latest version of the spreadsheet program that everybody is using.