From The Naked PC issue #5.05...

The Corporate User and the IT Staff: Part 2

by T.J. Lee
February 28, 2002

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, one of the reasons there's such a lack of communication between the end users and the IT staff that supports them, or more correctly so much mis- communication, is that both groups speak a different language and have very different focuses in how they approach computers.

Corporate end-users or "business users" (as one TNPCer wanted to be referred to) use the computer and the software that runs on it to "perform work." The IT staff are mandated to keep the computers and the network "working" and that is a very different thing altogether.

If there were no users logging on and running applications, the network would be a lot easier to keep working. This line of thinking is how the IT support and the business users come to consider theirs an adversarial relationship when it really should not be. The users allow the enterprise to create its work product (whatever that may be, goods, services, or both), which generates the revenue to pay for the network and the support thereof.

One communication problem I ran into recently has to do with getting "procedures" ahead of "policy." When a new technology is going to be implemented on a network it is important to have a policy worked out as to how this technology is going to be used. The business purpose that it will fulfill has to be clearly defined. Remember, for a new technology to be cost effective it has to meet one of the three "Lee's Laws for New Technology."

1) The technology must enable a user to accomplish more work than before in the same amount of time.

2) The work product generated by the user must be of a higher quality than was generated with the previous technology.

3) It must be possible to accomplish a task not possible without the new technology.

Granted that users are likely to find uses for a technology that the policy makers may not have considered but there should always be a policy in place and procedures for implementation worked out prior to just turning users loose with it. Consider the following example I ran into recently that illustrates both the need for policy/procedures as well as how quickly communication breaks down between IT and users.

A network upgrade included a piece of hardware from HP called a Digital Sender (9100C with a street price around $3,000). The Digital Sender is a nifty piece of hardware that lets you scan documents and send them to an email or IP address as a PDF file. It supports distribution lists, certain fax solutions, is fast and reasonably easy to operate. It also comes with some Adobe utilities that allow the images to be manipulated at the destination PC. One of these utilities that allowed the PDF to be optically scanned into Word was not working properly. Sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn't so the IT guys were called and told to "fix" the problem with the OCR utility.

Now, there was a problem with this utility, which involved having installed something prior to something else and if you didn't install the various pieces in the correct order you wound up with this problem. The IT department threw resources at the problem until they eventually "fixed" it. That's what IT support professionals do, fix things. And there was a problem.

However, the real issue was not that the OCR utility had a bug in it but that scanning and OCR was the WRONG technology for this task in the first place. Note the emphasis on the word "wrong." The user wanted to move data from a printed report that they received to a format wherein the data could be cut and pasted into different pieces. The problem was that this was numeric data and the error rate of OCR software makes it potentially disastrous to try to OCR this type of data unless you're going to manually check every figure, which was not going to happen.

The solution was to go upstream in the process and simply print the reports to a file format instead of printing to paper. The reports could then be manipulated directly without having to deal with hard copy and no scanning or OCR was required. IT solved the wrong problem because the user did not explain what they were really trying to do, just a symptom they ran into trying to utilize a new technology for the wrong purpose.

What's needed to avoid situations like this is a regular interaction between users and IT staffers where they can both step back from the day-to-day issues and consider the larger picture. What is the end product that the users are trying to generate? What technologies are available and how can they be implemented to achieve the business goals of the users? It's not uncommon for the company I work for to find unused or underutilized technology solutions just because no one has had the time to consider how they might be implemented. The users may not know of the technology (even those already available on their networks) or the IT staff does not know of the business problem a given technology could be applied to. Often it's a case of both.

You can reach T.J. Lee at:
mailto:tj_lee@TheNakedPC.com

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