Holiday technology frustrations remind John Tate of some important IT rules.

My wife and I went on a week’s walking holiday in Cyprus last month. We did one of those trips where the organiser transports the bags while we walked between hotels. It was our first visit to the country and we needed to decide what technology to take with us.

I had a few work projects on the go and required some computer access. So both my wife and I took our Apple iPhones and I took a Microsoft-based laptop. The systems I use are mainly cloud-based.

My Outlook email is hosted by a third party, but I keep a copy of the messages on my laptop in case I need offline access. I also make a good deal of use of Google Document, mainly for spreadsheets, which I can access when online. Finally, I use a number of web-based systems – for example for financial management.

Technology limitations

So how did the technology perform? Overall I was reasonably pleased with the result.

I managed to check my emails every day and send some fairly lengthy messages, and there was a huge amount of material about Cyprus on the web which we accessed, and that increased our enjoyment of the holiday.

However, the technology was not straightforward. My cloud email system has a limit on my mailbox size, so before I set off I needed to clear some space.

I archived some documents and backed them up on a portable hard disk, but frustratingly my laptop often does not recognise the device and it takes a lot of fiddling to get it to work.

I then needed to make sure my calendar was up-to-date on both my phone and laptop, but the synchronisation between both devices started to only work partially about six months ago. I have spent hours trying to fix this problem without success.

The Apple support forums defeated me, as they often do – hundreds of pages of material, but none with an answer that actually fixed the problem.

So off I went to Cyprus. Wi-fi access was available without extra charge in all of the hotels we stayed in, which was impressive. Unfortunately, in a couple of the hotels the room we actually stayed in was out of reach of wi-fi which was annoying. Also I could not use email on my laptop to send messages; a problem I have experienced before when overseas, and again the support forums were not helpful.

This was not the end of the world as I could use the web-based email interface as back-up to send messages. However this was clunky and lacked a lot of the features of conventional Outlook.

Other minor glitches occurred. My wife’s iPhone wouldn’t accept the ‘bundle’ the mobile provider was offering, so cost a lot more than we had planned; and I tried to ‘tether’ my phone to my laptop when out of range of wi-fi, but my telecoms provider doesn’t allow this when abroad but didn’t tell me.

So how does this compare to IT in a larger charity?

I have recently been involved in a number of projects where organisations are either in the process of considering moving to the cloud or reviewing their cloud implementations. Overall, I’d say the picture is similar.

Common experiences

Lots of good things can come out of web-based technology but the process of implementing the systems and managing the environment is not straightforward.

Support costs are often a lot higher than initially budgeted, integration between different applications is still very difficult and relying on having access to the internet to use an application will inevitably create issues.

This should be a very familiar story to those who have worked with PC-based systems over the last 30 years or so. We really must ensure that we don’t forget what has been learned over those past three decades.

The following are the principal lessons: take great care in selecting and implementing a new system; never rely on vendor promises – make sure for yourself that you know what you’re letting yourself in for – and don’t forget to put the back-up systems in place for when they are needed, as they inevitably will be.

John Tate is a business consultant, and a visiting lecturer at Cass Business School