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Troubleshooter 2
To the Travel Sector Account Manager, Mr Jones, Another hand-written report, but I expect it to be my last, as there is significant progress on the PC front. I do have an office now, even if it is a trifle cramped. My first initiative was to attack the difficulty of acquiring a PC. This is partly due to the complex paperwork, which spends many days in in-trays. I have specified an electronic system that should slash the time for approval from three months to three days. I hope that this will be up and running by the time you receive my next report. In parallel to this development I got all the stakeholders in the process around a table. This proved surprisingly difficult. It appears that the software people consider the PC support crowd rank amateurs, and no-one wants to talk to the engineers. Despite this, they all pulled together around the table and agreed to re-design the form and to look at the functions of each of the three committees involved in the process to see if anything can be taken out. Altogether a very satisfying outcome. Less positive was my attempt to untangle the company’s Internet policy. I first met with Steve Loss, a hotel manager who now spends all his time on IT from the user side. I liked Steve a lot. He has real enthusiasm for what technology can do - a refreshing change after the cynicism of the DP people. You could see the light of fervour in his eyes when he described how BritBreak could make use of the World Wide Web. I left Steve feeling inspired; it was only when I got back to my office (C23 - apparently it was once a cupboard) and tried to write down exactly what he had said that I became concerned. Steve’s ideas were inspirational, but lacked any practical detail. Take the idea of a BritBreak home page. He left me sure that we needed one, but I couldn’t for the life of me say why. I was still puzzling over this when I went to see Brian Finlay, the Network Manager, who has taken on responsibility for the Internet because he didn’t back out of it as fast as everyone else. An hour with Brian left me none the wiser. Despite being network manager, he has little grasp of the technical side of IT. Brian was wonderfully cheerful about this; he seemed to feel it was his strongest point. He thinks that the Internet is a dangerous toy that we should keep out of the hands of meddlers like Loss at all costs. Providing web access to BritBreak, he says, will result in the employees surfing the web all day, while hackers wander our systems with impunity. So, positive progress on the PC acquisition front, and at least I’ve identified a problem with buy-in to the Internet policy (whatever it is). Copyright © Creativity
Unleashed Limited 2006 |
The Troubleshooter column relates the experiences of a fictional consultant. Although the context is made up, many of the experiences related in Troubleshooter have happened in real UK businesses. Take a break from the creative pressures with Troubleshooter and return to your creativity refreshed. Originally published in PC Week magazine.
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