May 30, 2012 at 6:18 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Is Empowerment Good?
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May 30, 2012 at 6:40 am
Technology is a great enabler, but too often we think that just enabling someone with more options, choices and settings is a worthwhile exercise.
I believe the main problem is that people, at least the ones I work with, don't have the time to do their job right, so they learn the bare minimum of what is needed including basic software features. Then the burden falls on me and my coworkers to train them or do the tasks ourselves. There's a disconnect when you have developers doing Excel support or explain elememtary data analysis to analysts.
May 30, 2012 at 6:45 am
To some degree, the typist as specialty was a necessity. There was taking the original dictation, typing, proofing, reviewing, retyping etc which was very time consuming. With computerization, that excess labor shrinks to typing, making corrections on the screen, then finishing.
There certainly is still lots of room for delegation, but now things have become so interactive that a person can actually be more effective doing it alone. Consider an administrator working with Crystal reports, playing around with filters, adding columns, changing summerization schemes... the immediate feedback fuels even more creativity.
The machinery has become our assistant.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
May 30, 2012 at 7:12 am
Realistically, if you're worried about font/spacing, whatever, then you have the "secretary" create a form/template, and the executive just uses that, so they don't have to think about it. Problem solved, back to just worrying about content.
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"stewsterl 80804 (10/16/2009)I guess when you stop and try to understand the solution provided you not only learn, but save yourself some headaches when you need to make any slight changes."
May 30, 2012 at 7:14 am
Absolutely. computers have changed our world. Whether for the better will be the ultimate domain of the future to judge. We are still in transition and the technology is still developing. However, there are some observations which give us some indication of where we could go.
First, for all those people who would have been relegated to secretarial or clerical positions, the computer has leveled the playing field allowing them to reach potentials which would not have been previously possible.
Further, management (for the most part) must now do a better job of communication and not rely on a secretary to interpret, organize, and communicate a poorly thought out idea.
In short, computers provide the toolset by which anyone willing to take responsibility can succeed.
Rick Nunn
May 30, 2012 at 7:36 am
My signature says it all about technology.:-D
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
May 30, 2012 at 7:51 am
Well, Steve, I remember when an IBM Selectric typewriter was cool, all you needed for calculus was a TI-30 and callers could actually leave messages if you didn't answer your phone. Imagine this - my Grandmother witnessed the transition from horse-and-buggy to man walking on the moon.
Computers have indeed changed the world, which is constantly changing at some might argue an ever excelerating pace. Technology has always led that charge. Should I be dictating letters or typing them myself? With all due respect, it doesn't matter in my mind what I "should" be doing or if this way or that of adapting technology is good or bad. It is not comparable.
May 30, 2012 at 8:07 am
JP Dakota (5/30/2012)
Well, Steve, I remember when an IBM Selectric typewriter was cool, all you needed for calculus was a TI-30 and callers could actually leave messages if you didn't answer your phone. Imagine this - my Grandmother witnessed the transition from horse-and-buggy to man walking on the moon.Computers have indeed changed the world, which is constantly changing at some might argue an ever excelerating pace. Technology has always led that charge. Should I be dictating letters or typing them myself? With all due respect, it doesn't matter in my mind what I "should" be doing or if this way or that of adapting technology is good or bad. It is not comparable.
Disagree completely. The question of whether we should or should not be doing something is what leads to advancement. If we never asked that, we would just have faster ways of doing the same thing, not real change. Aerodynamic horse and buggy versus the possibility of self-driving cars soon.
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How best to post your question[/url]
How to post performance problems[/url]
Tally Table:What it is and how it replaces a loop[/url]
"stewsterl 80804 (10/16/2009)I guess when you stop and try to understand the solution provided you not only learn, but save yourself some headaches when you need to make any slight changes."
May 30, 2012 at 8:08 am
Steve, you are very correct that technology isn't designed effectively if it adds effort to a task, and even if it doesn't reduce effort. Why else would we use a computer (or any other technology) if it does not make us more efficient.
That isn't to say that having more work to do on a computer is automatically wrong. In some cases, like the Crystal Reports example, new work may be work that would never have been done before. In other words, instead of spending 8 hours a day doing task A, maybe now I only spend 2 hours a day at task A, but spend 6 hours doing task B. I increased my effort in one area, because I no longer had to spend so much time in another.
However I don't agree with the idea that non-technical workers can do technical work. Don't we learn from our previous mistakes?
Does anyone recall how bad the majority of VB development used to be, how bad Cobol development could be, when development was turned over to untrained individuals? (Note, this was edited to clarify the actual intent, and I apologize for the originally incorrect information)
The cause of that was putting "business" people in technical roles and expecting them to understand how to program. There is no difference between doing that and having managers write Crystal Reports.
There is a reason why people with experience were once valued highly. The teams that had expert VB or Cobol programmers were able to design far better code than some group of non-programmers.
Dave
May 30, 2012 at 8:11 am
JP Dakota (5/30/2012... Imagine this - my Grandmother witnessed the transition from horse-and-buggy to man walking on the moon....
Sad that final milestone was 40 years ago, so that XCor founder Jeff Greason's son asked him "is it true that people used to fly to the moon when you were a boy?" Boldness and courage has decayed into timidity and fear of change.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
May 30, 2012 at 8:12 am
What can be more troubling is when managers and other non-technical people are using tools such as SQL Management Studio because a developer has given them a script to run, rather than publishing a report. I thought this was insane the first time I saw it but I've seen it at a few companies. Often, this is a result of the manager's not putting reporting into an application specifications, so they try to get their information with queries directly into the database without even knowing how to write SQL. I think it's grown way beyond MS Word and making changes to Excel reports.
I've seen managers spend hours on trying to get these things to run, then they call the help desk and this goes to a DBA who has to spend hours training the manager to write SQL when they should have never been in a position to have to write SQL. Not all Managers and CEO's can be Tony Stark.
May 30, 2012 at 8:16 am
Disagree completely. The question of whether we should or should not be doing something is what leads to advancement. If we never asked that, we would just have faster ways of doing the same thing, not real change. Aerodynamic horse and buggy versus the possibility of self-driving cars soon.
History has shown that the process, and the evaluation thereof, follows the technology, not the other way around.
May 30, 2012 at 8:32 am
JP Dakota (5/30/2012)
Disagree completely. The question of whether we should or should not be doing something is what leads to advancement. If we never asked that, we would just have faster ways of doing the same thing, not real change. Aerodynamic horse and buggy versus the possibility of self-driving cars soon.History has shown that the process, and the evaluation thereof, follows the technology, not the other way around.
I'm sorry, trying to figure out how to say this without being contentious, but I can't quite pull it off. That's a ridiculous statement, how would the process *ever* move ahead of technology to complete the process? What you said is that it isn't important to ask whether we should be doing something or not. However, without asking that question, we would never make the jump to new technology, which would therefore allow the process to change? Necessity is the mother of invention, after all, invention isn't the mother of necessity.
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How best to post your question[/url]
How to post performance problems[/url]
Tally Table:What it is and how it replaces a loop[/url]
"stewsterl 80804 (10/16/2009)I guess when you stop and try to understand the solution provided you not only learn, but save yourself some headaches when you need to make any slight changes."
May 30, 2012 at 9:01 am
Delegation to those "office assistants" was critical at the time. Typing was a skill that was not universally mastered in the workplace. When you received a memo, the grammar and spelling were correct, sentences made sense, paragraphs were well formed and the intent and content was usually very clear. A good secretary or office assistant could usually clean up the errors without interrupting the author, allowing the author to use time more effectively.
Today, without this help, many office workers, especially managers, find that while their technical and managerial skills are up to the job, they are constantly defeated by the mechanics of writing. Too often, I have received memos (and emails) that verge on the unreadable and whose content is erroneous or misleading. When subordinates follow those memos, company resources are wasted on work that need not have been done and may have to be undone in order for the right job to get done.
I, for one, am a programmer: my expertise is in designing and building software. I am not a writer, nor do I aspire to be one. I would rather lay out the structure of a document, then turn over the writing to someone who chooses to be a technical writer. They will do a much better job than I can.
But, alas, 'tis not to be.....
May 30, 2012 at 10:09 am
Robert Domitz (5/30/2012)
I, for one, am a programmer: my expertise is in designing and building software. I am not a writer, nor do I aspire to be one. I would rather lay out the structure of a document, then turn over the writing to someone who chooses to be a technical writer. They will do a much better job than I can.But, alas, 'tis not to be.....
Makes me wonder if we ought to still have assistants. Unfortunately so many managers tasked with writing and communicating don't do a good job either.
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