Strategy and Tactics – Page 200 – IS Survivor Publishing

Power-user executives (first appeared in InfoWorld)

An old bit of folk wisdom warns you to be careful what you ask for, because you might get it.

Those of us who have worked in the trenches of PC support have fallen into this trap. Up to our eyeballs in frustration with end-users who want to know no more about how PCs work than they do about their cars, we wish they’d become just a bit more technically literate., and actually want to know about the remarkable technology we’ve put in front of them.

And what do we do when we get our wish? Complain about those irresponsible power users who insist on loading lots of non-standard software packages onto their computers, making support a nightmare while creating huge numbers of undocumented departmental applications we “just know we’re going to be asked to support”.

As the White Queen said in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” So do we, Alice.

So you’re a PC analyst and you think you have problems? Let’s take it up a few levels and see how the same situation plays out at the executive level. CIOs have griped for years that company executives don’t want to understand technology, don’t want to know about it, don’t view it as a strategic resource, and don’t want to understand why IS costs so much. We’ve begged senior executives to become more technically literate.

Well guess what, sports fans … we got our wish. According to a recent A.T. Kearney survey, the vast majority of CEOs feel comfortable dealing with technology issues, most have a working knowledge of the ones in use within their companies, and nearly half spend up to a half day each week learning about “relevant technologies”.

Life just isn’t fair. After years of CIOs believing business knowledge is more important than technical literacy, along come these “Power-User Executives” (PUEs) running in the opposite direction. (And does this mean an EIS must sport a PUE GUI?)

I’m guessing quite a few companies have PUEs with a better handle on how technology can advance their business strategy than their Technically Illiterate CIO (TICIO).

PC analysts can give TICIOs some good advice on how to handle this challenge.

When a PC analyst interacts with a power user, the analyst has to simultaneously respect the power user’s knowledge – business and technical – and to demonstrate dimensions of expertise beyond what the power user knows. “What you’re doing with Excel is really very good,” you might say. “Have you considered converting it to Access? This looks like it would work even better as a database. You could turn it into something that’s really cool, and that the whole department could share.”

CIOs need to do the same thing with PUEs. Respect their insights and knowledge of technology: “You’re right – Domino would be a great tool to help us communicate more effectively with our business partners. Projects like these get complicated in three areas: figuring out the intercorporate networking, agreeing on content responsibilities across the two separate company structures, and actually changing everyone’s behavior so they use it. Let’s start pulling a team together to look at how to make it happen.”

You have to both acknowledge your user’s expertise and extend it. Otherwise you’re just a bottleneck, getting between executives and the resources they need to get their projects done. And they’ll wonder how you can be leading IS when they know more than you do about technology.

Everyone in leadership manages relationships in four directions: up (to the boss), down (to staff), left (to service recipients), and right (to peers). Most of us master only two of these. If you’re focused on career advancement, you usually look up and to the right. If, on the other hand, you’re looking to actually succeed at your job you look down and left.

As CEOs gain sophisticated understanding of technology, the technically illiterate CIO will find him or herself trapped in a shrinking circle of organizational irrelevance, creating no value in any direction.

Push-and-steer, point-and-click (first appeared in InfoWorld)

I’ve told my share of “dumb user” stories. Whiteout-on-the-screen is a popular entry. I’m fond of the using-a-bulk-tape-eraser-as-a-diskette-bookend story. My all-time favorite has the punch line, “Well, your first problem is, that’s not a modem, it’s an answering machine.”

You don’t hear as many “dumb IS analyst” stories. Here’s one: “We don’t have time to do it for you, and we won’t give you the tools to do it yourself.” Another favorite: “I don’t care if you’ve solved your business problem – your data model isn’t in third normal form!”

The all-time classic goes like this: “No I haven’t been on the factory floor. Why would I want to do that?”

This New Year I resolved to eschew dumb-user stories altogether. They have too much in common with ethnic humor – even if the gag is funny, it’s generally in poor taste, and ties your thinking into stupid stereotypes.

For example (you were wondering when I’d get to the actual topic, weren’t you?) it renders computer training programs completely ineffective. Start with a dumb-user premise and you’ll design boring, basic, pointless computer classes that convey so little information that attendees wander away muttering about their wasted time.

When you’re teaching (and I’ve done a fair amount of it in my career) your audience believes what you tell them. Tell your class that computers are complicated and they’ll believe you. If, on the other hand, you tell them the truth – that computers greatly simplify many complex tasks – they’ll believe that instead.

How has the myth arisen that computers are hard to use? I hosted an InfoWorld Electric Forum on this subject awhile back, and the consensus was remarkable. Computers have become increasingly hard to setup and maintain, in lockstep with a trend towards extraordinary ease of use. In this they have a lot in common with automobiles. Very few of us have the specialized knowledge needed to even tune a modern engine. Driving, however, has become easier: push on the gas to go, push on the brake to stop, turn the wheel to steer. Cars no longer have the manual chokes, standard transmissions, or crank ignitions that used to complicate learning to drive.

Hmmm … push and steer. Sounds a lot like “point and click” doesn’t it?

Computers seem hard to use for two basic reasons. We’ll address one of them this week, and save the other.

Computers make such a huge number of different things easy to do that just keeping track of them all is daunting. Want to change fonts? Easy. Bullets and numbering? Easy. Standard deviations? Same answer. And on and on and on.

In fact, computers and the Internet have this in common – the hardest part of using them is finding what you’re looking for among all the other stuff. The actual operation is simple. And even here, there are so many different routes to each operation (menus, button bars, the right mouse button) that you can generally figure things out without much difficulty.

When you teach, emphasized that every single task is easy, and establish three goals for every class: (1) Make sure to clarify the concepts (folders are like their paper equivalents – you use them to organize your files). (2) Help everyone succeed in the actual operation a few times, so they knew they’re capable of it. (3) Make sure everyone knows how to look for the functions they needed, so they have the confidence to poke around among the menus.

And give them a bit of great advice: For each project, add precisely one new technique to their bags o’ tricks. (In a very short period of time, they’ll master an awesome assortment of skills with very low stress.)

This teaching style will go along way to making your end-users self-sufficient. Of course, there’s a downside to all of this: you’ll have far fewer dumb-user stories to swap with your friends.