Information Workers
Everywhere I turn I see information workers constrained by their inability to use & understand technology. Ease of use problem? Used to be.
The tasks these people are trying to get done are increasingly complex, and I feel they need to invest the time in learning some of the building blocks of technology. Want to edit video? You’re going to need to know something about moving around large files, even if you’re using iMovie. Want to design a piece for print? You need to understand DPI, and image compression formats. Want to build a website? I don’t recommend hand-coding HTML, but I do recommend understanding basic tags.
All the time around my office I hear the same problems come up again and again - people confused about which version of a document is current, because they emailed the document as an attachment each time they changed it. People who need to update a few words in an article hosted by a CMS, but can’t figure out why the formatting gets all screwy when they paste from an editor designed for print to an editor designed for the web. People who spend hours pushing around objects in Word because they’re trying to format something nicely, and aren’t aware of Publisher (or the reasons it exists).
I think because knowledge of information technology generally decreases as you climb the corporate ladder, this lack of skills is tolerated, and even accommodated for. There was a time when computers were just infuriatingly difficult to coerce into doing simple tasks, but those days are over. The things information workers are trying to do now are genuinely complex, and there’s no ease-of-use potion that will turn a complex task into an easy procedure. Businesses would be wise to push their employees to better understand the tool they sit in front of eight hours a day.
