The Gift of Bandwidth For Administrative Professionals

This week is Administrative Professionals Week. It’s a time to honor those “Radar O’Rilleys” of the office who keep everything running smoothly so management and staff can concentrate on getting their own jobs done. You’ve no doubt signed a nice greeting card and perhaps taken your secretary, administrative assistance, receptionist or other admin. support pro to lunch... Haven’t you? If not, better scramble and do something nice quickly. You have no idea how much doo-doo you could be in on Monday.

After the hoopla ebbs, there is something that still needs attention. Besides a little fawning and personal kudos, what administrative professionals could really use is better tools to help them be more productive. I’ve dealt with many great administrative assistants over the years and can attest that they are models of efficiency. They’ll take whatever’s available and make it work magic. But think how much more would get done if the tools worked better.

One big bottleneck in any business can be the WAN bandwidth connection. That includes point to point lines linking your business locations, and broadband Internet service. When the network slows down, everybody slows down. Those high performance admins that burn through a keyboard a week wind up drumming their fingers on the desk while waiting for critical files to transfer. Does that sound like a wise use of resources to you?

I’m going to make a suggestion here. Why not take about a minute or so and ask your administrative assistants if they are being slowed down by the performance of your computer network, especially for outside files. If the answer comes back “yes,” you probably can’t make a better investment than increasing that bandwidth.

That can be easier and cheaper than you imagine. Just ask your assistant or IT manager to run a quick bandwidth pricing check through a telecom broker. It can be done online in almost no time. All you need to know is the address of the business, who should be contacted and how much bandwidth you have in mind. Start with double what you have now and see what the results are. You might be shocked to find that you could have a lot faster network service for the same money as you are paying now. Wouldn’t it be a shame to let that opportunity go to waste?

Pssst. If you are one of those hard-charging administrative assistants being limited by data connections that are way too sloooowww, why not take charge and make this happen. When you tell your boss that you could get a lot more done with a faster network connection, also mention that you can take care of researching this without distracting from your critical work. Then get an instant online quote for bandwidth services and print off the results. Good chance the boss will say: “Go ahead and order that.” Then you’ll have one really sweet gift for Administrative Professionals Week.