BROCKTON, Mass. - Text messaging and e-documents may be the latest, but they’re not always the greatest.
“I’m a real big fan of the telephone,” claimed Dick Bastiansen, SVP-operations at $1.5-billion HarborOne CU here.
Credit Union Journal asked credit union IT leaders to name a technology that’s an “oldie-but-a-goody”–tools the credit union has used for a long time but that still get the job done better or as well as newer tech.
Beyond the analog telephone, computer printers of all sorts seem to have staying power at a number of CUs.
“Our Oki Data dot matrix printers are like little tanks for printing checks,” said Steve Jones, CTO at $245-million Signal Financial CU in Kensington, Md.
Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard’s discontinued LaserJet 5 printers have made their mark on $673-million EECU in Ft. Worth, Texas.
“They just keep going and going,” said Bill Burrows, CIO. “Every year, for the past several years, I was sure these things would die, and we would get rid of them.”
EECU has used the LaserJet for general document printing for more than nine years, despite the fact that many newer color and multifunction printers have been introduced, Burrows continued.
Pacific Service CU in Walnut Creek, Calif., enlarges and prints documents on a poster printer that is nearly 10 years old, according to Noelle Fischer-Herbert, VP-corporate development, at the $1.1-billion CU. And a few older fax machines are “still humming along,” she said.
Alliant CU’s fax machines have been around for more than 20 years, according to Rudy Pereira, SVP-operations and technology at the Chicago-based CU.
“I wouldn’t say they’re better–just very reliable and often overlooked because of their reliability,” Pereira said.
The fax machine’s reign at the $4.8-billion CU will soon come to an end, Pereira continued.
“A centralized fax server has and is replacing the conventional fax,” he said. “This way, anyone from their desk can send and receive electronic faxes and each fax received becomes part of their Outlook inbox.”
Indeed, some technology managers said that old tech doesn’t make the grade for certain jobs.
“For the areas I’m responsible for, we are pretty much using the latest and greatest,” said Eric Bangerter, director, Internet services at the $980-million UWCU in Madison, Wisconsin.
At Signal Financial, any vintage tools that are still around are merely a necessary evil, said Jones.
“While we have a bunch of old technologies, I wouldn’t say that there isn’t anything better,” he said. “It’s just that some of the core products that we use have to run on the old technologies.”
The CU has “gutted everything” that it possibly could over the past two years, Jones added.
New tools have their downside, too. “You have to train people to use a new technology, such as the fax server and the document workflow we’re using to replace copiers,” Pereira said. “But this problem is becoming less of an issue with younger employees who have high aptitude to learn these new technologies quickly, and who are simply not afraid to learn.”
Meanwhile, Bastiansen subscribes to the belief that, if the telephone had been invented after e-mail, everyone would be excited about the telephone. Bastiansen attributes this idea from Frank Perlitz, a retired EVP of First Federal Savings and Loan Association of East Hartford, Conn.
“E-mail is a poor form of communication that results in misunderstandings and missed opportunities to resolve issues,” Bastiansen explained. “Oral communication works really well.”
MORE
Read more about old tech at cujournal.com and search the following bolded terms in the archive:
Internet-Connected Phones: Gold Standard In Security, Reliability?
Old Standby, New Attention
Is The Paint Peeling Around Your Website? Think Of The Message
For info on this story:
* www.eecu.org
* www.harboronecu.com
* www.pacificservice.org
* www.sfonline.org
* www.uwcu.org (c) 2008 The Credit Union Journal and SourceMedia, Inc. All Rights Reserved. http://www.cujournal.com http://www.sourcemedia.com
