When Broken IT Becomes ‘Just the Way We Do Things’
Are your staff working around your IT?
Nobody raises a ticket for something that has always been broken. They just build a little routine around it instead.
Somebody keeps a second laptop under the desk because their own one takes eleven minutes to wake up. The figures get typed into a spreadsheet for a second time because that is how it has always been filled in. The printer only behaves if you turn it off and on again first, so everybody does, without even thinking about it. There is a chap in accounts who comes in at half seven, purely because that is the only hour of the day the report will run without falling over. He does not think of that as an IT fault. He thinks of it as his morning.
None of these are dramatic. That is exactly why they survive. Ten minutes here waiting for a screen to load, five minutes there wrestling the printer, twenty minutes on a Friday retyping something a system should have handed over on its own.
Now do the sums on that. Ten minutes a day, one person, is roughly a working week gone by the end of the year. Put four or five people on that same ten minutes and you have quietly lost a month of somebody’s time, paid for in full, with nothing to show for it. No invoice ever arrives for that. It just comes out of the same pot your wages come out of.
What makes it worse is that your good staff are the ones doing it. The conscientious ones invent the workaround, absorb the extra twenty minutes and say nothing, because they do not want to be a nuisance and because somebody told them four years ago that it was just how the system is. Your provider hears silence from you and quite reasonably takes that as everything being fine.
You will not find any of this in a report. You find it by walking the floor and asking a question that sounds daft, what do you have to do every day that you think is stupid?
Then stand well back, because the answers arrive at speed once people realise they are allowed to say it out loud.
So, when did anyone last ask your team what they work around, rather than asking your IT provider whether everything is alright?
If you would like a fresh pair of eyes and somebody who will actually ask your staff that question, get in touch.
Jacqui
J & J Systems, Canterbury
