I remember reading an article in a men's fashion magazine a few years ago. It said that because the "street" trend was to wear pants lower and lower, this caused the style of "corporate" pants to also have a low waste.
First of all, thank God for that. It was have been difficult transitioning from student clothes to corporate attire had that attire being up to my navel.
Second, this highlights the natural trend that things happen "on the street" before corporations adopt it. This is an interesting phenomenon by itself, and it is interesting how it applies to technology.
Here's a typical scenario.
At work, you probably use Windows XP. Your e-mail experience is either Outlook, which crashes often, or Outlook Web Mail. No doubt, you have mastered the art of sorting your e-mails by date then recipient to track conversations. At home, you probably use GMail. You're conversations are nicely clustered together, and when you can't find something, a quick search is all it takes.
At work, you might even be using Internet Explorer 6. At home, you might be using Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer 8 or Chrome. All of these things have the killer web browser feature: tabs. Tabs, of course, have been around for nearly 10 years. However, you likely have several windows of IE 6 open, and naturally, because you are using Windows XP, this slows down your system considerably.
Even at Melbourne Business School, I'm somewhat appalled that my Data and Decision class is designed for those running Windows XP and Office 2003. These are technologies from 2001 and 2002 respectively. I use a Mac, but the class relies on a plugin (StatPro) that only works on Windows. I refuse to buy a Windows license, so I'm running a VM with Windows 7 RC and Office 2007.
If the technology and ease-of-use gap between your corporate (and study) technology life and your home life frustrates you, you're certainly not alone. Gen Y and beyond are going to start demanding that their technology experience is not degraded when going to the office. Employers would be wise to take note; the productivity savings could be enormous.
Upgrading Internet Explorer 6 would be a good place to start.
3 comments:
"Every day you get to use new technology and are exposed to new exciting things. Then ... you go to work."
I agree with you wholeheartedly: organizations really do need to keep up technologically as best they can. Certainly the pressure on them to do so will only increase.
That said, you'll probably find it's a little more complicated than that. For example, I was recently talking to the IT systems people at my workplace about this because they are working on the organization's IE6 to IE7 migration. I asked why they hadn't done this years ago, why it was taking so long now, and why they weren't moving up to IE8. It turns out that 2-3 of our web-based business critical applications are customized to run on IE6, so when you try to use them with IE7, they don't work properly. One of these applications, for example, is our online HR system that manages everything from leave applications to our annual performance plans. So this seemingly straightforward browser upgrade means they first have to upgrade a number of other business critical systems and applications before they can go ahead with the IE7 rollout.
Of course, if these business system developers hadn't customized their code to run with the hugely non-standard browser that IE6 is, our IT department wouldn't have had this problem in the first place. Unfortunately, there's not much that can be done about that now.
Oh, and those other system upgrades are changing those web applications so they work with IE7 and not IE8 (even though the latter is more standards compliant) so we'll be stuck with IE7 for maybe another decade or so. Oh well.
In the mean time, with recent technological advances like mobile broadband (whether on a mobile phone on via a USB modem) it's not very hard for employees to get around lack of technological advances (or even technology restrictions) in the workplace. For example, I bring my own laptop and USB broadband modem to work. I also run a number of PortableApps off my USB stick. And I do all this despite the fact that the web team here has customized computers that have additional browsers and web & multimedia software installed on them.
Such is life in a large corporation.
@ameel I agree that this process is not straightforward. Indeed, this case reminds me of the dangers of not following standards and the peril of vendor lock-in.
But is also reminds me of learned helplessness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness). The easiest solution would be to install Chrome or Firefox AND leave IE 6 where it is.
Or to ditch these systems altogether for new ones.
Just because you can't quantity to the productivity loss from using outdated technology doesn't mean it isn't real (or substantial). It very well might be worthwhile to incur large costs but more these core systems to newer ones than to keep employees using slow, crashing, insecure browsers without tabs. After all, if these rely on IE 6, they must be several years old.
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