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Written by Tony Phelps
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Thursday, 17 November 2005 |
How good are you and your business (or the business you work for) at
using IT? Do you think of what you’d like to do and then find some way
of doing it, or do you take the easy road and do what you always did
until someone shows you how to do it differently?
IT has a long history and firm reputation for dictating what can and
cannot be done with its products. In other words, you get what you are
given, and if it’s not to your liking, that’s too bad. This has led to
many people sharing an attitude that IT controls them instead of the
other way round.
Unfortunately, IT is still awkward to use, difficult to configure, and
continually changing. Even so, odds are that if you can think of
something you’d like a computer to do for you, someone somewhere has
come up with a way of doing it. Of course it may be expensive, it may
take a lot of time and effort to set up, but the point is that you
should not allow yourself to be held back by IT. Let your creativity
loose, and when you come across an idea that depends on some sort of IT
service to support it, do a bit of research to see if there is a
solution around that meets your needs.
VIGNET is a good place to start (see below) for queries about what can
be done, and how it can be done. Local IT suppliers are another source,
most of the time you should be able to get some free advice, even if
only initially. And of course there is the internet with its search
engines such as Google, if you are able to put your idea into words
that other people will have also used.
There are some amazing products and services available, and with the
growing open-source phenomenon there is every chance that there is a
free version too. At the end of the day, if you don’t ask, you won’t
get!
Stepping back and looking at the way things are done around you is
difficult, particularly if that is how they have been done for a long
time and they have become habit. However, in personal life as in
business life, it is wise to constantly evaluate whether you can do
something more cheaply, more quickly, or more easily by changing the
process, the supplier or the technology. Even if there is an upfront
cost involved, you might find that it pays for itself in saved time,
higher productivity or lower stress. |
