I was thinking today that it is crazy that most companies employ people and let them use computers for most things but that very few insist on any formal qualifications to prove you know what you're doing. To think of the number of times something is saved in the wrong format, things that should take minutes take hours because somebody doesn't know the quick way and generally computers that should save loads of time take longer than pen or paper. I reckon any serious company should:
1) Insist on a formal qualification for the level of IT work required in a job (i.e. basic Office skills, Basic Database Operation or whatever)
2) It should be rammed home that if something is repetative and time consuming that it can be done faster using the right technology (even a few hundred pounds is cheaper than days of someones time).
One example of IT indeptness was when I used to work for a company where someone had to send out loads of letters to Doctors whose addresses were in a large book and that had to be looked up manually and typed into a template letter (100s of letters a week). I asked the person whether they had the details on disk and showed them how to mail merge. Hey presto, a 1 or 2 minute job now took 5 seconds.
Somebody told me the other day that somebody measured the productivity of a company before and after computers were introduced (over a 20 year period) and that the productivity was identical. That figures. People buy the wrong kit and don't know how to use it. To all you clever IT managers out there, work out how to use your stuff properly and you might save £1,000s!
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