I was chatting with my banker a few days ago. I bank with one of New Zealand’s major business banks and they’re about to update their website. It’s ‘big news’ apparently.
I was showing her something on the web and was surprised that her web browser was still IE6. Sure, it’s ok for my grandad, but not my banker. I mentioned that she could easily upgrade to IE7 (I didn’t bother mentioning firefox). I mentioned she could do it herself, and thereby increase productivity. Her response…
“I’d like to but I better not or i’ll get in trouble.”
I wonder if IT departments realise the grip influence they can have on staff productivity? Not to mention staff head space. Productivity is a good thing. It’d be nice to hear YES more than NO. I suppose the default has to be NO when dealing with insecure platforms. Thankfully there are more secure ones being developed all the time. I can’t even put into words how fragile school software is. We’re talking MS-DOS level for the student database. Only 10 users can be online at one specific time for the report writing tool.
I spent my lunchtime today helping an HOD of a maths department set up a basecamp account. She was impressed and saw how it could increase her department’s productivity and remove the need for so many meetings. David Heinemeier Hansson would be proud. I saw that she also had IE6 (she wasn’t updated to IE7 when the more technical departments were because it was only maths). Pity.
It seems abit of a shocker that staff in some organisations are given such low privileges. Let’s get some perspective; You could be in control of 15 maths teachers with a budget worth tens of thousands of dollars and you get account privileges so patronising that you can’t even change the default homepage on your [out of date] web browser, let download google’s chrome.
Via Rowan in this post I came across a fitting quote:
“Some companies treat their employees like grown-ups. Some don’t. It’s nothing new.”
Source: Worldwide Online Auctions News, August 3, 2005
Often though it’s not the company but the IT department that patronises. I guess the prevalence of more web-based apps will mean IT departments have less different influence in the future.
Power to the people!
