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back to article Balancing user and business expectations

Nobody wants to go back to the early days of packaged applications when green screens were the norm and users got what they were given and had to come to IT if they wanted anything different. But should we really be going to the other extreme, as some would argue, and let users take control? It has become quite trendy now to …

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  1. Paul 4

    What company is this

    "Yet allowing the latest generation of employees to fritter away time ‘networking’ through social media, or browsing the internet to keep up with events because they ‘expect to interact and be well informed’ is something we just have to accept?"

    And where do I send my CV? Come on. There may be some uber hip "meeja" companys that alow this, but not most.

    To be quight honest from the companys I have worked for I think the questinon "whos company is it" needs to be asked more by lower staff when asked to work overtime or make importand choices for the bosses when they want too blame someone if it all gose wrong.

    As for the idea of giving people more infomation, I think alot of companys need to work better with what they have at the moment. Too many think distribution of infomation is too email it out to some people then hide it on a shared drive, along with all the other infomation from the last 10 years. Its not so much the amount or type of infomation being given out, but the way it is given.

    If there is a problem with the amount of infomation given it would be cross departmental comunication, where in many companys departments guard there teratory to strongly, not sharing things they think of as there own, be that data which is not showing them in the best light, or things they have developed or paid for from there budgets which they feel others should pay for themselfs if they want it.

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    1. Paul 4
      Reply Icon

      Note to self...

      Spell check. Thats bad even for me.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    One of the "big four"

    "And where do I send my CV? Come on. There may be some uber hip "meeja" companys that alow this, but not most."

    We had this nonsense dictated from on high and had a bucketload of complaints when facetwat was blocked by a new proxy server. Our european colleagues were most bemused by the fuss created.

    I wonder how it's viewed in these more austere times...

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  3. Evil_Trev
    FAIL

    Users!, call in the BOFH

    The problem we see is that there is a belief in education that we should raise peoples aspirations and expectations, this leads to issues.

    I am firmly of the opinion that it is a bad idea to raise childrens expectations and aspirations higher than it is likely they will achieve. It leads to a sense of betrayal and failure when they filter into the workforce at, as with most new entrants, the bottom end of the corporate food chain.

    This is most specifically the case with those fresh faced young graduates who seem to mistake 'trainee' with 'CEO'

    With non-graduate, non-specialist, users the situation is worse, I suspect the world is brimming with poorly thought out spreadsheets, and very badly designed Access databases. Stored on P.C. local drives with no backup, no auditing, no support if user X leaves.

    We need to restrict users from making these mistakes, not encorage and enhance their ability to royally foul the nest.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I do, they can jolly well take what they

    have been given, and a little bit of gratitude wouldn't go amiss either.

    Users in control, you must be on another planet, if they want control, they can stump up the cash to have it done properly and feel the pain of having it just the way they want, logical paradoxes withstanding.

    You know, I would be quite happy if they didn't have computers, and only those who could build their own and install an OS themselves had them, it would be one hell of an advantage.

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  5. James 100
    Grenade

    Two sides to this coin

    Evil_Trev has a point about all the dodgy improvised Access "databases" etc, but a few years of multi-company joint projects showed me the other side of that coin: the company which had an admin assistant counting hits in a web server log file *by hand*, having assured her there was no way they could automate it, the central web administration team which took over a month to remove one stray tag from a page because they couldn't work their CMS properly...

    Having worked on both sides of that particular fence, I'd have a lot more sympathy with central IT department's complaints about "inferior" home-grown setups if they were making more effort to deliver an adequate service themselves. The centrally-provided Netware server used by one of my departments is full up, and nobody has the budget - or authority - to get it upgraded - so of course all new data ends up on individual hard drives instead, then the brighter individuals submit expenses claims for Dropbox and Carbonite subscriptions to keep things nice and safe.

    Looking at the costs and quality of service delivery, actually, I suspect it's the competition which really worries a lot of larger and older IT departments: I can complete a file restore job from a commercial backup service (with hourly backups and no manual intervention needed) in less time than it takes me to get the necessary budget charging codes to submit a restore request to the central IT department to pay for someone to go and load the previous week's tapes and see if the file was lucky enough to get backed up this time.

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