What if the U.S. Postal Service tapped the vast array of available digital information technologies to enhance sales, operations, and new business development? The possibilities, it would seem, while not endless, are fairly extensive.
That’s the conclusion of a just-released white paper from the Postal Service Office of Inspector General (OIG), which collaborated with IBM to take a high-level view of digital information gathering to see where the postal industry might benefit. The white paper, Enriching Postal Information: Applications for Tomorrow’s Technologies, identifies those opportunities most relevant to the postal industry. We found more than 50 potential postal applications where gathering digital information could enhance the Postal Service’s sales, operations, and new product development, as well as improve its internal safety and security controls. Such items include banking services, traffic information, and assistance to elderly citizens.
A few highlights from the paper:
- Cutting-edge organizations see digital information technology only as a means to satisfy market demands and control costs. Such organizations are focusing on mobile handhelds, barcodes, and Radio Frequency Identification applications to collect data about their customers and operations. Many are consistently researching and investing in a wide variety of information gathering technologies. For example, UPS invests more than $1 billion annually to design customer-centric applications, customized scanning tools, and advanced communication devices, as well as, to increase internal efficiencies.
- The Postal Service is also exploring the potential of mobile devices but on a much smaller scale than UPS. For example, the Postal Service recently gave cell phones capable of texting and gathering real-time GPS data to about 95 percent of its street letter carriers. The information being collected should improve delivery efficiencies via better route designs, day-to-day adjustments, and monitoring delivery times. The Postal Service is planning to deploy 75,000 full-service digital mobile carrier devices by the summer of 2014
via Great Expectations: Enriching Postal Information | Office of Inspector General
So, this January 26th there will be an increase in postage rates– for ordinary people. For many years the head honchos of the postal service have tried their best to propagate the notion that parasitic corporations whose survival depends on the postal service are “the stakeholders.”
Even since Benjamin Franklin we know that the postal service belongs to the citizens of this nation.
No longer!
Come January 27th if you come to the post office or buy stamps you will be penalized: Corporations and the rich who use “postage meters” will pay less than regular American citizens!
This is one of the great ideas that USPS management with corporate Congress will force upon the citizens of this country.
I see this jacka$$ “all your tsp belongs to us” spout hate of all management. Why don’t you try to help solve the USPS problems? Have you submitted a lead, do you pay your bills by mail, look for ways to do your job better? I don’t think he will. He is much happier saying the same stupid thing every post. What a loser…
USPS mgmt. is incapable of even running the USPS, let alone fixing it.
The USPS had a huge area at the Consumer Electronics show. Didn’t see one person stop by the 30 minutes, I was in the area. Some of their marketing ideas are a waste of time, and in this case a huge amount of money.