Users of the Research in Motion device keep growing in numbers and devotion to its merits
Peter Wilson
Sun
Darryl Rawlings, president of Vetinsurance who is shown with his dog Charlie, says he gets 500 … Photograph by : Bill Keay, Vancouver Sun
Tech firm executive Idris Mootee admits he’s addicted. And it’s been that way for about a year and a half — ever since he got his BlackBerry.
He carries it everywhere — checking his e-mail in elevator lobbies, in cabs, before a plane takes off and when he’s trapped in a boring meeting.
“When somebody is saying something not very interesting, the sign of that is that you see everybody kind of looking down and typing away on their BlackBerry,” said Mootee, Toronto-based vice-president for strategy at Vancouver’s Blast Radius.
It even makes him uneasy to turn his BlackBerry off on the weekend, in case he might be missing something. And he’s never lost it because he makes sure he has it everywhere he goes.
Mootee is by no means alone in this addiction, which is so prevalent that the device — which provides users with e-mail anywhere anytime — has long been labelled the Crackberry for its ability to keep users coming back for more day-after-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute.
And the user base just keeps on growing. From the end of August to Nov. 26, Canadian-owned Research in Motion (RIM) — maker of the BlackBerry — added 645,000 subscribers worldwide to a total of 4.3 million, most of them in the United States.
RIM has said it expects to add another 700,000 to 750,000 subscribers this quarter.
Originally, the largest number of users of the BlackBerry were those in the financial industry, who, by law, had to keep track of all their communications, and found that the device was a perfect way of doing that.
Now BlackBerrys are commonly found in the legal industry — where lawyers can quickly communicate with colleagues outside the courtroom for key information without disrupting the proceedings.
They’re also popular with business development specialists, investment bankers and the like.
And the push now is into sales forces and in-the-field workers like technicians who have to keep equipment up and running and need to be extremely quick in reacting to emergencies.
Like most BlackBerry users, Mootee sees his device as giving him more flexibility.
“You get out there doing other stuff and then you can resolve something with a couple of sentences,” said Mootee. “So it does bring a lot of productivity.
“Using it doesn’t mean you work longer, because the work is still there. If you don’t answer this thing today, then it will come back to you the next morning.”
And, naturally, RIM has a study, done by Ipsos Reid in 2004, that backs up the idea that using a BlackBerry makes you more efficient.
Ninety-eight per cent of BlackBerry users surveyed said the device allowed them to convert downtime into productive time — with the average user saying they recovered 47 minutes in downtime each work day and saved almost half an hour a day in personal time.
The study also said that because of this efficiency, companies can save $21,000 US a year per user, who, on average, process 2,750 time-sensitive e-mails while out of the office each year and make 1,400 external phone calls annually.
Darryl Rawlings, the West Vancouver-based president of Vetinsurance Ltd., which provides medical insurance for dogs and cats, uses his BlackBerry to keep up with as many as 500 e-mails a day.
He said that having a BlackBerry means he or others on his staff can deal quickly with a problem when there’s an emergency.
“Our business is 24 hours a day in that dogs and cats can get hit by cars or do all sorts of things and in some cases our call centre can’t deal with them,” said Rawlings. “It’s a way you can have more managers on duty at the same time as they’re out enjoying their life.”
However, Rawlings finds himself concerned with the cost, which at 500 messages a day amounts to $6,000 a month.
He’s hoping to find a better way to handle this in the future, perhaps with a WiFi phone that will connect with the Net without him having to pay by the volume of messages.
West Vancouver-based realtor Karin Morris said she found her BlackBerry a major help when she went on a European vacation with her husband.
She used it to keep up with what was happening with her listings and clients back home, as well as dealing with meeting friends in Provence and with problems that arose at home, where she has several foreign students boarding with her.
“Any messages I got from clients I forwarded to the realtor who was looking after my work while I was away,” said Morris. “And then the realtor was able to e-mail me and ask me questions.”
At one point Morris got an offer on a property and was able to communicate back and forth about that.
“It would have been really hard to do that by phone because of the time difference,” said Morris. “I was able to keep up on a daily basis with the work that was going on.”
And when a crisis arose when one of her boarding students decided to head off to Victoria during the recent teachers’ strike without telling anyone, she was able to handle that as well.
“We were in France, Italy and Portugal and it worked just like I was here,” said Morris. “It worked beautifully.”
And, when she went to New York to see her son who lives there, she was able to stay in touch.
“I was able to e-mail him about the pickup and where we would meet,” said Morris.
Mootee said the BlackBerry has become a new kind of social habit, which still has people struggling with the proper balance brought on by multi-tasking and the information overload.
But he believes these are problems mainly of new users and that once people get used to the BlackBerry they find it a way of life.
“Every time I get on an airplane, everybody takes their BlackBerry out before the flight takes off and are typing away.” said Mootee. “And I think that’s very funny. It’s almost like a club. Okay, you’re a member, a Crackberry member.”
And nobody could be more of a member than someone like Alan Panezic, RIM’s senior manager of technical services, who gets about 300 messages a day.
However, Panezic said BlackBerry users should learn to filter the messages that they have to deal with while they’re out of the office so that the experience doesn’t become overwhelming.
New users, he said, tend to become entranced with the technology and initially let everything flow through, but they soon learn this isn’t a smart way to work.
“What we’ve done with the software is that we’ve actually provided the user with a utility to filer,” said Panezic.
“They can say ‘You know what, I don’t want any e-mails on this subject coming to my device anymore, because there are other managers and vice-presidents in my group for whom that is important. And if there are any issues they will let me know.’ “
As well, everything flowing to the BlackBerry doesn’t have to notify the user that it’s there, Panezic said.
“So, there’s an ability to set the profile on the device, based on what the subject is, to say don’t notify me. I’ve done this because I get 300 e-mails a day. It would be quite possible for me to start feeling like a nervous wreck if my device was buzzing 300 times a day.”
Panezic has set his BlackBerry to let him know right away if he gets a message from a manager or from other executives.
“These are people with whom I typically have an implied response time. Everything else that I get wirelessly on my device I’ll handle when I get free time. So I’m fully in charge of deploying my time instead of feeling I’m a slave to the device”
And that use of free time — whether it’s in a meeting there was no reason for him to attend but he can’t leave without being insulting, or when he is just walking from one place to another — that Panezic likes the most.
“If you ever listen to one of those success gurus, they like to say the difference between the top 10 per cent and the bottom 10 per cent is not a 200-per-cent aptitude difference. In a lot of cases the difference is in the application of that aptitude. [Successful people] are more productive and stay more focused and don’t get distracted as much.
“And the same thing applies from a wireless applications perspective. You’ve got to respond to what’s important.”
For top executives, Panezic said, the BlackBerry means they can be on top of things 24 hours a day.
“For most senior executives there’s sort of an unwritten rule that they’re always on demand. They might keep their BlackBerry on the nightstand and when it buzzes at three o’clock in the morning they’ll open their eyes, take a look and then go back to sleep.
“And that makes them feel connected and very in tune with their universe,” said Panezic, who admits that it’s not something he does. “It becomes a question of is the e-mail managing me or am I managing it?”
One thing that Panezic said having his BlackBerry has done for him is helping to keep him in touch with his family while he’s travelling.
“I do a fair bit of travelling internationally for RIM. On the one hand, I’m lucky to get the opportunity, but on the other it can be hard to stay in touch with home.”
Now, he said, he can grab a minute in a taxi or sitting in a plane waiting to take off when he can answer an e-mail from his family or send a note.
“And that dramatically improves quality of life, because my family never feels like I’m completely out of touch,” he said. “When I used to travel in the past they might not hear from me for a couple of days.”
While Panezic said he doesn’t take his BlackBerry on vacation he realizes that there are a lot of people who do, people who would rather not have to get everything done before they go away and then face a jam-packed e-mail inbox when they return.
Both getting ready for the trip and worrying about what they’ll find when they get back to the office can make people so anxious they’d rather just take the BlackBerry with them and handle important e-mail right away.
Panezic said the most exciting thing for people at RIM is where the BlackBerry is headed — especially being able to take information from inside the company and pass it on to employees so they can use it to keep track of sales on a day-by-day basis.
“One thing we hear a lot from sales reps is that it’s really difficult for them if a customer has had any technical issues with a product,” said Panezic.
“Now they can download the information on technical problems the customer might have had and do that in the parking lot before the meeting.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2006