Isn’t IT supposed to be essentially in the productivity business, making people more productive and effective at work? A session at last week’s Interop raised a good number of questions as to just how well IT is working today.
One of the most interesting conference sessions I’ve had the opportunity to participate in occurred at last week’s Interop conference in Las Vegas. While I Chair the Wireless and Mobility Track, I also spoke in a session called “Future of Work: The Great Debate“, which was Chaired by Manuela Farrell, the Conference Manager for all of Interop. While there wasn’t as much debate as I’d personally hoped for (a good argument being one of the best paths to the right answer in so many areas of human endeavor), there was a good deal of provocative thought in this one – and, since most of us spend on the order of a third of our adult lives working, and since I spend so much of my time in the quest to make the IT part of enterprise work more productive through the application of wireless and mobile technologies, this is a subject quite close to my heart.
But let me start with a little philosophy, since I believe that work is fundamentally philosophical in nature. I know that this argument won’t appeal to everyone, but I think the very essence of life is in work. This, I’m sure, doesn’t sound so good to many, so let’s start, then, with a definition work. Given that the fundamental mission of any civilized society is the creation of wealth and value, so as to enhance the opportunity for improved standards of living and quality of life, work is what we do for others as part of this quest. We seek out and meet the needs of specific constituencies. Granted, we all expect (and must have; we’re not slaves, after all!) some kind of ROI for the time we invest, be this financial, psychic (a good ego massage), altruistic, or simply entertainment, but the fundamental process is simple: we do something for someone else, ideally something we want to do anyway, and we get something we want in return. The process isn’t foolproof, but, when it works, and especially when our work is what we’d do even if they didn’t pay us to do it (i.e., work=play), life is a thing of beauty, and “work” loses any negative connotations that it might otherwise have. The happiest people I know really love their jobs – we call them workaholics, and they really don’t care and couldn’t be happier.
Unfortunately, for those of us who work with information (who are “knowledge workers”), there’s often a lot of trauma associated with reaching that level of satisfaction. I’ve railed in these pages against complexity and especially attempts by certain suppliers of information technology to impose for their personal gain their vision of progress via monopolistic or similar techniques. But, as capitalism by its very nature encourages diversity, it’s up to us to decide whose vision we wish to reinforce by where we place the fruits of our labors. In theory, anyway, the system should work.
So, then, what’s working in IT? I think there was good agreement in this session about the overall importance of mobility, the value of wireless, our increasing beneficial dependence on the cloud, and the consumerization of enterprise technology, and I proposed two additional elements. The first is extending virtualization all the way to the device, and the second is a greater role for objects as a solution to complexity. With respect to the former, it’s about platform-independent applications and the need to carry fewer devices – and improved reliability, security, and overall integrity, things that really slow us down when problems occur. And with respect to the latter, I used the example of presence, a function that allows an individual to post a notification as to their (possibly conditional) availability, location, and other related parameters. Why does every application have its own presence function, thus necessitating redundant settings in multiple places? Why isn’t this simply an object available to any application that wishes to use it? Why aren’t we building all apps, local and cloud-based, in an object-oriented fashion? Why do we seem to optimize for the suppliers of technology, and not the users? Where are the user groups demanding that vendors think in terms of usable, cost-effective solutions?
OK, I’ve hit these themes before. But the whole purpose of IT is to improve productivity across the enterprise value chain, and we can’t do that if we allow complexity to continue to proliferate. Work may at times of necessity involve at least a little bit of sheer drudgery, but IT should be about (and measured on) improvements in productivity at least in part by eliminating the pain – and, dare I say it, making a huge chunk of our lives at least pleasant if not fun.
