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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

A lot of my correspondence comes from people who think their employers should do more — or at least anything — to make their workplace more enjoyable and fulfilling.

They’re right. The correlation between treating people well and a higher-quality workforce is not exactly controversial, and even with a cooling economy good employees have no trouble finding other work.

When the shoe is on the other foot, though, a lot of you seem far more interested in keeping your headaches to a minimum than in creating a quality work environment for everyone else in the company.

Yes, it’s mailbag time here at the IS Survivalist Institute, so we’re going to defer our continuing exploration of the integrated IS plan until next week. This week we’ll deal with the mail I received following my column describing how IS botched the introduction of the PC and still hasn’t learned from its mistakes..

The mail I received split demographically into writers who lived through the introduction of the PC and agreed with my recounting of events, and those who didn’t and didn’t. A question: If you weren’t there, how come you’re so willing to disagree with eyewitnesses?

To those readers who pointed out that as company resources, PCs shouldn’t be under end-user control, you make a good point. And since that desk you’re sitting at is a company desk, you won’t mind when internal audit goes through your drawers, file, and interoffice mail on a regular basis, will you?

Besides, IS often causes far bigger problems than individual end-users. When it’s your installation, though, you blame the vendor instead of accepting responsibility for poor planning and testing. (Yes, vendors could make it a lot easier, but they don’t. Deal with it.)

The mutual finger-pointing that goes on between IS and end-users starts with you blaming them. If Dell can build millions of PCs to order, you can do better than delivering a one-size-fits-all minimalist PC configuration and then complaining when employees individualize their systems. Here’s the program:

1. Segment your user community: Talk with a wide variety of end-users and their managers, and define five to 10 logical groupings, such as basic users, travelers, power users, mentors, and heads-down data entry staff.

2. Determine work habits: You may be surprised at the complexity. Consultants, for example, sometimes have network connections, sometimes use modems, and sometimes connect to client networks. If you don’t carefully craft an appropriate work environment, they’ll be in Network Neighborhood every couple of weeks. And you’ll blame them for goofing up their systems.

3. Determine resource needs: For each logical grouping, draw a picture with a member of the group in the middle. Around the periphery draw the resources they need access to. Then figure out how they’ll get that access.

Don’t assume. Ask — and be prepared for surprises. That group you thought was a candidate for NCs may not be, for example, because they send and receive e-mail with Microsoft Office attachments. Don’t argue, either. For example, I refuse to use Outlook as my personal information manager, because I rely heavily on Ecco Pro’s outlining capabilities. I’m willing to use something else, but not to give up capabilities I make extensive use of. Don’t argue: I know how I work better than you do.

4. Plan configurations: Tailor standard configurations for each group. Design them. Show them to group members. Test them. Assign people in your group to try them on for size. Push, poke, and stretch them. Find out where they break and where they develop DLL conflicts. Fix what you can fix and train the help desk on what to expect.

5. Roll them out: You have some retrofitting and training to do, so plan the roll-out carefully to minimize disruption. This should be fun, though, because almost without exception you’ll be improving employees’ work environments in a recognizable, tangible way.

6. Keep it current: Review your standard configurations at least annually to see if there’s anything you need to change.

Sound like a lot of work? Maybe, but it’s both less work and more rewarding than responding to the problems and complaints you get now.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Recently I described some research I bumped into 20 years ago about a parrot that appeared to understand both the meaning of the words it mimicked and at least some elementary rules of grammar. Not having heard anything more about it, I concluded the research didn’t pan out and parrots are mere mimics after all.

My thanks to dozens of IS Survivalists who set me straight on this subject. Dr. Irene Pepperberg and Alex, her African Gray Parrot, are alive and talking to each other. It’s fascinating research. Bop over to http://www.cages.org/research/pepperberg/index.html to learn more about it. My apologies to any parrots I may have offended by likening them to the wrong class of human beings.

Offending human beings is OK, though. It’s your turn if you’re one of those who insist on giving the company what’s convenient rather than what’s important. You probably don’t recognize yourselves. To help you sort it out, you’re the ones most likely to explain that anytime you deliver something that’s inconvenient, it’s really a violation of IS standards that will further increase maintenance costs, cause PCs to require rebooting five times a day, and besides, the company really doesn’t need it anyway, regardless of what the person doing the work says.

The history of the PC is excellent evidence of this attitude, as an IS Survivalist who asks to remain anonymous pointed out in a recent letter: “Since the IS organization ignored us, we bought PCs to do our work, until the IS organization woke up and discovered their mainframes were dinosaurs.

“So the IS organization went to our management and took over our PCs and then demanded money to manage them. They then complained we used them for things other than functions their mainframes used to do, and since they never tried to understand what we do with them, they mismanaged them.

“The costs for PCs skyrocketed because of this mismanagement, so CIOs were invented to keep us from buying anything. Then the CIOs discovered our computers were becoming obsolete (because they wouldn’t let us replace them) and they mandated we replace them, but we had no money because we gave it all to the Information Systems people who squandered it on lousy PC support contracts.

“Instead of finding out what we need to do our work, and providing tools for us to use and standards for us to follow, IS people now dream up misguided, grandiose, expensive projects to do it all for us and leave no money to do the things that need to be done. And we, the user organizations, end up doing all the computer planning ourselves, developing our own standards, and inventing workarounds to the cumbersome system set up by the IS organization and the CIO.”

Overly harsh? Maybe. For example, I don’t think CIOs were invented to keep end-users from buying anything. That’s what corporate controllers are for. CIOs were invented to be comforting to business executives who had trouble relating to technical managers whose sole excuse for holding their jobs was that they got things done.

The first PCs to enter businesses were bought to enhance personal effectiveness. They lacked the really stupid features of the 3270 interface and they made end-users independent of IS (a huge factor in their popularity). If somebody sold software that would be worthwhile to the end-user, that end-user could simply buy the software, install it, and enjoy the benefits.

This is InfoWorld’s 20th anniversary year, and in those two decades IS has gained control of the “personal” computer. In doing so we’ve tried our best to make it as impersonal as possible.

When I attended the University of Minnesota, its management tried to encourage the use of mass transit, not by making mass transit more convenient but by reducing the number of parking spots. Students, faculty and administrators, however, preferred the device they could personally control — the automobile.

We can talk about how PCs are an enterprise resource all we want. We can’t, however, change human nature, and end-users don’t want an enterprise resource on their desks. They want a personal device that provides access to enterprise resources.

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