Sunday 28 February 2016

Car Wash

If you do the Twitter thing, follow me at @HousingITguy
or LinkedIn here https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tonysmiththathousingitguy


I was sitting on a bus the other day, looking across the street from clogged up traffic. What did I spot, one of those car wash places, that have sprung up, like autumn mushrooms in a forest, in all our towns & cities.

I bet when you were growing up, like me, the carwash was a mechanical thing, requiring no people. I believed what 'Tomorrows World' told us. I.E. We would have more leisure time, more computers would be doing the work etc, etc.

Well. we never quite got the jet-packs either did we?

But how on earth could we go from automation back to manual? That doesn't make sense, or does it?

As experience suggests, most workers at the manual carwash are paid extremely low salary. We are in an economy where some salaries are racing to the bottom. I am told for little more than £9k you can pay someone to manage a whole Travelodge. It's not a world my old man would have recognised. but it's here and we need to work with it.

What's this got to do with IT? You might well ask.

Where it comes into play is how sometimes we have unreasonable expectations that IT applications, or our ICT team, should be applied to support 100% of our needs. Clearly this is unreasonible and by now, regular readers of this blog will be quite rightly screaming, "What about the 80 / 20 rule?".

Quite right too.

Our application systems must support the 80% of our bread & butter processes, which are in effect our low hanging fruit. Fail to recognise your low hanging fruit at your peril. Maybe a lot of that remaining 20% could be supported by (semi-)manual processes. I have seen a lot of situations where actually, that last 20% maybe should be dealt with in a manual manner. It goes against the grain, no doubt about that .

Often, using low paid interns, younger workers, students is far more efficient than spending a lot of money twisting the IT solution to those last few requirements. Often people seemed intent on pouring money into ICT to do a lot of things that actually, (the right) people can actually accomplish far better.

So, my suggestion is, don't be ashamed when your ICT solution only makes the key 80% of your processes work well, recognise when people not IT works better, perhaps it was not to be, revert to manual.

     Catch the blog monthly archive at https://archive.org/details/@housingitguy

Related Post: Don't judge books by covers, or application software by how its badged... 

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 Rose Royce - Car wash Rose Royce - Car wash.
(c) Tony Smith, Acutance Consulting www.acutanceconsulting.co.uk 07854-655009


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