[geeks] And The Linux Weenies Wonder Why They Aren't Mainstream...

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 @ 07:18 -0500, Nadine said:

> On 3/5/06, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
> > Another huge problem (sometimes) is the amount of work done in an office
> suite
> > that really should have been done by some other software or personnel.
> >
> > People use office suites to do tons of things manually that used to be part
> of
> > a company's services, both computer and secretarial.
> 
> People seem to have forgotten how to do things like mail merge and such--
> now they want to turn everything into a web application, or since "everyone"
> knows $wordprocessor and $spreadsheet, the expensive engineers, project
> managers, and managers/directors are doing jobs that should be done by
> administrative assistants.  I can't believe that's an efficient use of
> salary.

Exactly.

Years ago when I was working for a company, I never did my own purchase
orders, non-trivial memos, and that sort of thing. The company had an internal
supply officer, printing department, purchase order expert, and secretaries
well trained in their tasks.

Now everyone has a PC, so you have a bunch of people who really don't
have expertise in those functions doing the work on their PC.

Not only is it inefficient because they simply are not as good at it as the
specialists, but it can make the company look bad.

The specialists make sure everything is uniform and well done, the average
desktop jockey is just trying to get it over with.

The PC has been treated as some kind of magic device that lets anyone to
anyone else's job, but that's simply not true.

Another thing: the software I used to use on minis and mainframes was very
detailed, very friendly (yes, believe it or not), and was written to bundle
expertise in computer form to aid people not used to the particular task.

A lot of "administrative" type software now like PO, secretarial, etc doesn't
seem to have been crafted with the same care.

There are exceptions of course. For example, I visited a company that had
everything on the internal web. However, it was really a front end for the
specialists. You could submit your own PO and other adminstrative jobs, but a
real human received and processed it.

The computer automated a lot, and notified one of the specialists if
something was wrong or it just wasn't programmed to handle it.

The company did not get rid of their print shop, secretarial, and supply
personnel, they just automated a lot of the work and wrote an app which
helped people interface with them.

Seems like a better idea to me.







-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["It's a damn poor mind that can only think
of one way to spell a word." -- Andrew Jackson]