Ben Cranks, pre-sales technical consultant withHP’s personal systems group, says there is “a classic issue” where technology “offers huge opportunities for improving workflows but only if applied correctly”. For example, there’s a lot of interest in using tablet devices to enable a mobility strategy but HP believes that“is seeing the situation the wrong way around, the mobility strategy should enable the use of tablets. It sounds counter-intuitive but the message we’re trying to deliver is that the business needs to articulate goals and work back from there, not define hardware platforms and try and make those fit the goals afterwards”.
“…it never ceases to amaze me that so many have no business benefit or focus on what they do” – Michael Conway, Renaissance
He says the IT industry loves “to declare revolutions” but believes mobility “might actually justify that label by forcing us to look more at business processes than devices to realise the potential benefits, if we don’t do this users will find themselves in the same loop of new devices with the same old problems”.
The great untrained
Peter Trevaskis, enterprise solutions marketing manager at Dell Ireland, says it’s wrong to use the word ‘fault’ when talking about people using a system or application the wrong way. “When a new system or application is deployed, the user – whether a senior administrator in an IT department or a clerical assistant in payroll – will immediately examine the system to see how to do what he or she currently does without looking to see if there is a new way of doing it,” he observes, assuming they are left to their own devices and not given adequate training.
“New systems or applications may have many new features and functions but many of these are ignored by the custom tailored training that seeks to address a specific need,” Trevaskis adds.
The solution is a combination of knowing the existing business, knowing the processes supporting the business, understanding how these processes are mapped to the new system and developing training that fully educates the user base on the functionality and processes, Trevaskis argues.
Conway puts it very succinctly when he says: “It’s not fair to say to someone you have a word processor and you’re not using it as you should be – maybe they’re using it the way they want to use it.”
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