I often see huge amounts of effort go into streamlining the back end reporting interface, that 5 people use, and almost no effort into the front end that 5,000 people use. Even if the 5,000 people earn a 1/10 of what the backend staff do, this is still a massive misinvestment of effort.

Yes, not all minutes are equal, but there is a big difference between people choosing to waste time and people having their time wasted by a poorly designed system. Very different problems to fix, and very different impacts on morale.

However, I think the point about losing a minute per employee should be considered “all other things being equal”. Not all minutes are equal. If a tool is wonderful to use but it takes off a minute a day, I’d let it stay. Also, in this age of Internet news, blogs and tons of email, a minute here or there is not a big deal. Maybe the tool lets you use the other 479 minutes better.

When I was an IT manager, I had the same passion, as did the people I hired. We wanted to do ‘good stuff’. For many IT has become just a job - I even met an IT guy the other day who doesn’t have a computer at home. What’s that all about?

It goes beyond traditional ‘requirements’, give people what they NEED to get the job done, not just what they appear to WANT. Aiming above the target to hit it.

What can best be changed?

Remote access systems that appear designed to make remote access as difficult as possible. I spent 10 hours this week attempting to resolve a software problem. That’s one day’s work ot of the window. Not to mention the hours before ad after bitching about it.

“Helldesks” whose main appears to prevent you reporting a problem. In trying to report the problem above the advice from one advisor was that I should swap the ends of the ethernet cable in case that was causing the problem.
Excuse me? his wasn’t te first instance of the problem I had come across and I had so far, tried a reset option, stripped out and reinstalled the problem software. Twice. Stopped the router, re-booted the PC.
And I’m not a techie. I’ve just done it so often I can do it in my sleep. Stop insulting my intellgence.
And don’t get me started on corporate hoop-jumping that a) appears to be deisgned just for the hell of it and b) appears NOT to have been designed with the users in mind. Oracle systems that insist in refreshing the screen each time you enter a field. Do you know how irritating that is on a screen with 30 fields? Organisational systems that crash when everyone has to use them at end of year. Resilience? Yeah, right. Organisational systems that stop when one person does a search.

I could go and and do on a reguar basis.

You’ve tapped a raw nerve. And the biggest raw nerve of all? This isn’t new. We knew about this 20, 30 years ago guys. User requirements aren’t a dirty word they’re just that. A REQUIREMENT