Consumer IT in the workplace
Jill Taylor at 10:58 GMT on 11 October 2010
Has anyone else noticed how much of a buzz there is around the use of consumer IT in the workplace? Intrigued about our own situation I asked our head of IT recently what colleagues are using. I thought there may be a surprise or two hiding somewhere, or even something magic to transform my working day! His reply probably reflects what is being used in your own companies: iPhone; Skype; Google Docs; Facebook; Twitter (Tweetdeck & Hootsuite); SMS (for sending VPN authentication codes).
I then asked him about his support strategy for these consumer tools. “Very simple”, he said, “self help unless it’s core network/ hardware/ infrastructure related – very little support is required because the products are intuitive and easy to use. There’s also a vast amount of assistance available online through knowledge bases and forums. And, our users generally know their products better than IT.”
All of which got me thinking about software user interfaces again, and why it is that business software isn’t easier to use. It was where we started with the development of the gDoc Fusion user interface.
If consumer stuff is so easy and fun to use, then why isn’t our day to day business software too?
11 October 2010 14:49 GMT
Jill
I could not agree more, I use a well respected recruitment process manager software (probably the biggest in the country) and oh my goodness how difficult to use and unappealing it is. Okay i will give you the fact that recruitment agency software is not really ‘the fun stuff’ but actually making it slightly more user friendly would be great and think of the savings if all our business process software became intuitive and easy to use, the learning curve would be removed and we would all be lottery winners
Matt