Colm Warner, mobility consultant at CWSI, believes “the rapid evolution of IT can create other problems when less technical users get left behind or require more training, which detracts from the productivity gains that technology otherwise enables”. He does not think workers are at fault for not using technology effectively “if it changes as quickly as they can be trained to use it, particularly users who might not be technically minded. While there is certainly an advantage to a lawyer, for example, being able to find pertinent information based on keywords, the technology does not yet enable someone to open a practice without a legal qualification. The skills and core knowledge required to do a job are still required, regardless of the benefits of technology”.
“…[a] business needs to articulate goals and work back from there, not define hardware platforms and try and make those fit the goals afterwards” – Ben Cranks, HP
Eamon Moore, managing director at E-mit Solutions, says companies need to adopt a “business first, technology second” approach. With technology changing on such a regular basis, “it is natural for people’s fear of change to kick in”, he suggests. If you want employees to embrace technology and new solutions, you “have to get to the root of the core business issues they are having, as well as the daily tasks that they carry out. Very often we find that people have been carrying out these tasks for so long that they feel too comfortable, even though it might not be the most efficient way to do so. As the conversation develops, we dig deeper into how a business process works and more often than not, there is always plenty of room for improvement”.
Gaps
Cranks accepts lack of training can be an obvious issue when it comes to understanding the gap between IT and what people are able to do with it, but he believes ‘training’ needs to start at the outset by encouraging IT users “to change their mindset around IT from being somewhat of a ‘necessary evil’to a vehicle to solve real business issues and improve how they carry out their work”.
To this end, he suggests that a training session on how to use a particular technology solution “will only be truly successful if the people being trained believe that their work lives will be all the better as a result, and that they are not just there because management decided that training was needed”.
So how do vendors and their partners help customers use technology to their best advantage rather than cause them to change their work to use IT to the technology’s best advantage? Cranks claims that in HP’s case, it can use experiences gleaned from its breadth of customers to share a knowledge of what has worked and, more importantly, what has not worked. His role as a pre-sales consultant “is entirely about sharing the experiences of my colleagues across HP from Alaska to Zanzibar as to what has worked and what challenges we have encountered”.
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