Unfortunately, too many of us give the folks in IT the reason to view most users as somewhat incompetent. While this infographic below may offend some folks I encourage everyone to see the humour.
Source: HP Service Anywhere
Archives For support
If you have or had children who played with other children at their homes or in a other locations other than your own, the question “Would your mother let you do this at home?” is often used by the host or concerned parent as a gentle way to deter activities in children other than their own that they are uncomfortable with. For many of these parents who said this to the Harapnuik brothers their answer most often was…Yes!
The picture above is of the living room of our current home in North Vancouver and as you can see the traditional use of the living room has been supplanted by the Harapnuik brother’s bike repair shop. If you look beyond the obvious, these boys have too many expensive bikes (…and their road bikes aren’t in the picture), and try to understand who lives this way one might assume that this is just a bachelor pad and the boys are living by themselves or with other young males who have very different or unconventional priorities. No, my wife and I also live here.
You may then assume that this family and perhaps the parents don’t appreciate the finer things in life and are very tolerant of disorder. You would be wrong again because the picture below of our living room in our house in Texas clearly shows that we do have a taste for the finer things in life. Take a few minutes to view all the pictures of hour house in Texas and you will clearly see we do appreciate a fine home and that my wife is a wonderful decorator – Saddle Creek Estates house in Texas.
The picture of our boys using our living room as bike shop demonstrates just how committed their mother is in supporting their dreams and how much she believes in them. I often wax eloquently about creating significant learning environments but in this single act of allowing her boys to use a very special space in our/her home as their repair shop (we currently don’t have a garage) she is telling our sons that their dreams of becoming professional racers/riders are significant and that she will do what she can to help build the environment that will help them to achieve those dreams. For anyone who knows my wife Marilyn you know just how much she loves to have people over, so to give up this valuable meeting space is not something that she would do without significant motivation.
It is my hope that my boys appreciate the sacrifice and the commitment that their mother has made toward supporting them in their goals. It is also my hope that the modelling of support and commitment that a family needs to make is a value that my boys catch and bring to their own families in the future. My wife’s flexibility in our living space, her willingness to shuttle the boys and their friends up the mountain and then wait for them to ride down and then do this over and over again, and her modelling the commitment and sacrifice it takes to achieve very big dreams are key factors in being an intentional parent.
I have been writing about being an intentional father for the past several months and now I realize that without my wonderful wife’s commitment and support I would not be able to do what I do and I finally recognize I should be talking about becoming an intentional parent NOT just an intentional father. I have been talking the talk about being an intentional parent and my wife has been walking the walk or being an intentional parent. This is demonstrated so clearly by the answer to the question – Would your mom let you do this at home. My boys can answer – Yes she does and so much more.
In the TechRepublic blog post 10 of IT biggest sand traps Mary E. Shacklett, president of Transworld Data, points to ten common IT problems, or sand traps, and offers suggestions on how to avoid them. Mary’s list is accurate but I want to consider that the list has much more to do with managing people and their expectations than it does with technology. The list includes:
- Uncooperative users
- Unhelpful users
- Lack of tool integration
- Platform loyalty
- Poor project management
- Lack of documentation
- Poor data quality
- Jargon
- Unrealistic deadlines
- Lack of people skills
Other than “lack of tool integration” all of these problems are people problems, not technology problems. But even lack of tool integration has its roots in people because someone or some group chose the tools that the organization is using and that individual or group didn’t challenge or vet the tool vendors adequately to determine how well the tools API work with other tools within their infrastructure.
Another potential technology problem that has its roots in people is poor data quality. Once again it is people who develop the methodologies, policies, and procedures for putting the data into the databases. The better a data collection system is configured the more effectively it is used and the less duplication or corruption of data exists.
These IT issues are major sources of problems for higher education because they rely so heavily on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Human Resource (HR), Student Information Systems (SIS), and Learning/Course Management Systems. The problems with these systems and the resources required to maintain and support these systems take time and resources away from other educational technology initiatives that have the potential to have an even greater and direct impact on the student learning experience.
IT departments in higher education need to get so good at implementing and supporting these infrastructure systems that it appears that they simply go away. Once IT gets to this point and the fundamental IT infrastructure works so well then time and resources can be spent on the online, mobile, social, media, and communication technologies that are so important to our students and their future.
To do this, IT must hire individuals who have people skills, not just technology skills. This may also mean that promoting your best technicians may be a wrong move if those technicians are not able to lead and manage people effectively and, more importantly, are able to interact with the user and user groups in a language that is jargon-free. Furthermore, IT in higher education needs to hire leaders and managers that are able to communicate in “Geek” and Acadamise” because the ability to translate between the two groups is so important in resolving so many of these typical IT/people problems.
Implementing and managing technology is the easy part for IT, the management of people and their expectations is the challenging part. Finding the right leaders who can build and lead an organizational culture that can understand and work to resolve these challenges is the key to mitigating these common problems.
