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!