Amanda's Posse

Meet Amanda (not her real name).

Daddy's little girl isn't just helping out with the chores. She's an archetype. On the surface, she's mimicking her parent's behavior helping to keep her home neat and clean.

Thirty years ago, the weight of the family vacuum cleaner would have prohibited her from doing it at all.

And sixty years ago, she'd be using a broom and dustpan (probably with unsatisfactory results).

But technology advancements are allowing her to accomplish tasks that once could only be done well) by those with far more practical experience.

Imagine how she'll change the way work gets done, once she hits the workforce. This interesting article at readwriteweb details how the generations are using the Web and related technologies.

Extrapolate some of the findings of this article to our little girl as she enters the workforce. On day 1, when most of us would be figuring out where the washrooms are, she'll arrive at work with

• 5,000 Facebook friends
• A mobile phone with 1,000 contacts, 750 Productivity apps (and one click access to call all her Facebook friends)
• A high degree of comfort with advanced web search techniques.
• A practiced ability to multitask that's beyond our current comprehension, honed by more than a decade of handling many different text conversations at once.

She'll be able to research any problem quickly, find out how others have handled it, get opinions from experts and colleagues alike and do it without really having to think about it.

You won't just be hiring Amanda, you'll be hiring her posse.

Image credit: www.theblogfathers.com

Do you have a Hovercraft?

I enjoy the recent Orbitz (the travel company, not the gum) commercial, where an average guy watering his yard is interrupted by a landing of the Orbitz Hovercraft.

The pilot emerges to hand the guy a refund check, because after he booked his flight, the prices dropped and he was entitled to a refund for the difference.

"Why didn't you just mail it?" the confused homeowner asks.

"Because we have a Hovercraft!" is the reply.

And so it got me thinking. How many work processes exist because they can?

Painfree Computing

Next week, I'm starting an internal I.T. program called Painfree Computing.

It's designed to eliminate some of the causes of end user frustration. This is going to be a long journey, but in the end I know it'll be worth it.

Our eventual goal is standardization, standardization, standardization. And to accomplish that, we're going to have a LOT of conversations with our user community before we reach the promised land.

But our team needs a mindset change as well. We don't always make things as easy as we could for our users. Too often, processes which should be improved, are ignored and evolve into a "us vs. them" or "they should have known better" discussion. Unfortunately that doesn't prevent the problem from re-occurring.

Out team spends a good portion of our day looking at other business processes like quoting, order entry, field service, testing etc and while that's all good, we sometimes fail to see that we have operational improvement opportunity in our OWN backyard.

Over time, we'll take a look at the entire computing process from the time our users show up in the morning and hit the on button, to logoff at night. We're going to look for ways that boot time can be reduced, all custom applications will automatically be updated to the latest version, software suites will all be patched to the same (current) level, systems will be backed up automatically to the network, remote access will look, act and feel the same as if our users were in the office.

I.T. processes, like Bug fixes will contain workflow to automatically notify us when new bugs are reported by our user community and auto notify our users when they are fixed.

Stuff will just work.

At least that's the plan!