Way back in April 2009, I posted a piece on CIO.com titled “Office 2007 Doesn’t Really Suck; It’s Just Misunderstood.” Little did I know it would create such a fuss.

Over the past 11 months, the piece has received a smattering of comments, many of which are tinged with vitriol. Office 2007 doesn’t just suck, according to CIO’s readers; it’s reviled, despised, detested, loathed.

Taking a stand by sticking with an earlier version of Office is hardly a political move.

Here’s a sampling of the comments:

“I’m a longtime Office user (since its inception). Office 2007 is an abomination and shows just how out of touch those developers are with real world use and workflow.”

“Thought my suckage meter was just already broken or something, it being beyond the warranty period, but as the 10 or so days went by from having installed this step backwards in software development, and having not latched onto what I had assumed was some kind of groundbreaking innovation in GUI, I started to suspect that Microsoft’s product itself had gone beyond the limits of my suckage meter and broken it… and everyone here has affirmed that.” Read more…

admin Office 2007, Rants AT&T, CIO.com, FORTRAN, Help Desk, Icelandic, Office 2007, software support, Swahili

If you read only one article this week (not counting this blog post), make sure it’s this one by CIO.com’s Thomas Wailgum – “Enterprise IT’s Top Enemy: Its Own Arrogance.”

An IT department that points and laughs is hardly encouraging learning and business alignment.

The piece highlights the fact that the help desk, despite the growing importance of IT/business alignment in the enterprise, remains in the “condescending gatekeeper role.”

As evidence, Wailgum includes a video that features Andy Bitterer, co-chair of Gartner Group’s BI Summit, doing Jay Leno-style “man-on-the-street” interviews in London. Among Bitterer’s questions to the masses: “Do you use a database?” “Do you know what Business Intelligence tools are?” “Do you know what OLAP is?”

Honestly, does this Gartner bloke really expect everyday people to know what these things are? As Wailgum asserts, Gartner conference attendees may find it amusing (ha, look at the stupid users!), but it really demonstrates how out of touch IT is with its customers. Read more…

admin FAIL, Help Desk Andy Bitterer, BI, business intelligence, CIO.com, Gartner, Jay Leno, London, OLAP, Thomas Wailgum

The headline of a recent article in Computerworld magazine grabbed my attention: “Help Desks Under Siege.” An image of angry workers armed with flaming torches popped into my mind. They were storming the help desk, calling for an immediate moratorium on rebooting and demanding basic rights like software that doesn’t require patches and updates. There were even rumblings of self-serve password reset capabilities.

A supply closet as an office? For employees who are responsible for the computing capabilities of an entire company? Shame on them.

Alas, the piece wasn’t about corporate coups d’etat (it’s a little far-fetched, I concede), but it did highlight the pressing issues help desks are facing today, in this sorta-kinda-post-recession era. Namely…

1. Efficiency

The piece’s author, Cara Garretson, mentions improvements that would make help desks more efficient, such as a central knowledgebase, remote control capabilities, and a database of standard responses to common problems. The problem, says Garretson, is that those improvements cost employee hours.

They don’t have to.

There are companies out there, outsourcers or “best-of-breed” service providers like us, Read more…

admin Help Desk Cara Garretson, CIO, CIO.com, computerworld, Customer Service, outsourcers, temps

We may very well be embarking on the decade of the customer. Social media, especially Twitter, has empowered customers, and the recession has reminded businesses that keeping clients is easier than bringing in new ones.

It’s like watching your siblings bicker at Sunday dinner. Ugh. Enough already. Bring on a solution.

With the current state of customer service, a renewed focus would be a welcome change.

Look at current tech publications and you will surely find a rant or three about horrific customer experiences (for a recent one, see CIO.com’s “Tech Vendors Behaving Badly”). Search Twitter for “customer service” and you will find scores of tweets cursing the ineptitude of Company X and Company Y.

It’s like watching your siblings bicker at Sunday dinner. Ugh. Enough already. Bring on a solution.

You can start by taking note of a recent book, “Your Call is (Not That) Important to Us,” written by Emily Yellin (http://www.emilyyellin.com/) and featured in a recent AARP Bulletin story. Yellin, a journalist, wrote the book after enduring a particularly frustrating customer service experience herself.

Her book presents a fresh look at the customer service industry, and offers the average person some insight into the reasons many companies opt to automate and outsource to foreign companies. Read more…

admin Customer Service AARP, CIO.com, Customer Service, Dell, Emily Yellin, FACEBOOK, JetBlue, Outsourcing, Twitter, Zappos

The recent software and tech news is all about making the best of what you have. Bloomberg reports that in Venezuela, they’re tweeting their way around traffic snarls to get to work on time; Chief Learning Officer reports on the unlikely good that’s come out of the recession; and CIO.com offers three tips to get the most out of Microsoft Office. Read on…

Training is likely the number one way to get more out of Office, or any software for that matter.

Tweeting in Traffic is OK… in Venezuela

Whoever says Twitter is an ego-driven time-waster should spend a day in a Caracas traffic jam. In a recent Bloomberg News article, reporter Daniel Cancel writes about the Twitter revolution in Venezuela. Because the country’s gasoline is so cheap, there are twice as many cars than the roads can handle — which, naturally, means ample traffic jams. Enter the BlackBerry, Twitter and @Trafico, which Venezuelans are using to navigate their way through the gridlock.

Venezuelans, Cancel notes in his article, are way ahead of the rest of the world in terms of using Twitter as a traffic tool. And, for anyone concerned about Tweeting while driving, average speeds in Caracas are 7 to 9 miles per hour. Read the story here.

The Beauty of Recession: Increased Adaptability

November’s Chief Learning Officer offers up the finest in Glass-Half-Full news with “Recession’s Silver Lining? Increased Adaptability,” which reports that American workers have become more flexible in the past few years. Some highlights from the piece: Read more…

admin This Week in Tech News @Trafico, Bloomberg, Caracas, Chief Learning Officer, CIO.com, Cloud Computing, Microsoft Office, recession, Twitter, Venezuela

Tech publications are abuzz about Windows 7, which debuted yesterday. One article in particular, written by CIO.com’s Shane O’Neill, offers smart ways to use your migration as an opportunity to increase IT department efficiency.

Look for case studies of companies that have already migrated successfully. Use them as a guide.

Good stuff, all around. If there was one loud-and-clear point in the piece, it was that planning is vital to a successful (and not exorbitantly expensive) migration — no matter the operating system or software suite.

And it happens to be this company’s mantra. We know from experience that, whether it is a small firm switching over a few hundred users from Lotus Notes to Outlook or a Fortune 500 company upgrading to Office 2007 en masse, a successful migration depends largely on preparation.

In addition to the four points mentioned on CIO.com, I’d like to add a few more migration tips for CIOs:

1. Seek out proven migration successes: Look for case studies of companies that have already migrated successfully. Use them as a guide. Read up on Windows 7 trouble spots (that is, where users will likely experience productivity loss. (I wrote about this in a recent post.) Read more…

admin Windows 7 CIO.com, migration, productivity loss

This week’s terms are all about employees: how to nurture and grow their skills, and how to recognize the value that results. Throw out your crusty old business 101 biases, put on your 2009 hat, and read on.

As if keeping technical skills up-to-date wasn’t enough of a challenge for corporate employees and their managers, along comes a whole new soft skill: virtual competence.

According to researchers at the University of Western Ontario, virtual competence is made up of three parts: a person’s ability to build online social relationships (virtual social skills), his proficiency using technology (virtual media skills), and self-confidence (virtual self-efficacy).

According to an article by CIO.com’s Jennifer Kavur, virtual competence is necessary in workplaces where teams are separated not by cubicle walls, but by entire oceans or continents. (Read Kavur’s article here.)

With ROII, it’s a little murkier. It deals with what you cannot see.

And although it sounds like yet another item to embellish on a resume, researchers emphasize that the onus for ensuring employees develop such skills should be on managers, rather than on the workers themselves.

An excerpt from Kavur’s piece captures the essence:

“The more a firm needs its people to collaborate online and work with remote locations and make use of mobile devices like laptops and PDAs, the more they need to look at this ensemble of skills and how they can help their employees develop it.”

The second entry in today’s tech jargon roundup, ROII, goes hand-in-hand with the first. Not to be confused with old-fashioned ROI (return on investment), today’s ROII is modern, new-fangled. Read more…

admin Tech Babble Chief Learning Officer, CIO.com, ROI, ROII, tech jargon roundup, virtual competence

A story in this week’s New York Post astonished me. Titled “Typewrite & Wrong,” the piece revealed how the NYPD recently spent $1 million on typewriters.

Typewriters. In the year 2009.

In the NYPD’s defense, a commenter noted the department’s prudence for not wasting money on technology its cops didn’t know how to use.

In a subsequent article on CIO.com, writer Thomas Wailgum detailed the department’s efforts to update its technology, and noted that change, especially at the NYPD, is slow — hence the embarrassingly outdated purchase. In the NYPD’s defense, a commenter noted the department’s prudence for not wasting money on technology its cops didn’t know how to use.

While I agree that investing in technology and not teaching people how to use it is a gigantic waste of money, I don’t think the NYPD should continue to shell out money for crusty old technology that is useless for modern crimefighting.

Think about it this way: If a hospital decided to buy Windows 95 instead of a newer version, because training all of its staff would be too great an undertaking, what do you think the patients would say? And how do you think using such dated technology would affect the hospital’s ability to give patients the best care?

Simply put, it wouldn’t fly. So why does it at the NYPD, an institution that is responsible for the well-being of one of the world’s largest cities? I’m baffled. Read more…

admin Rants CIO, CIO.com, New York Post, NYPD, Thomas Wailgum, typewriters, Windows 95

After reading a recent rant on CIO.com, I’ve decided that Meredith Levinson is my new favorite blogger*. Her post, a response to Computerworld’s Best Places to Work in IT feature and accompanying sidebar 7 Tips for Keeping IT Employees Upbeat, was laced with vitriol, but it wasn’t wholly bitter. She included a speck of humor, and a heap of truth.

The Computerworld piece that raised her hackles included these suggestions for building employee morale: Read more…

admin Office 2007 Migration Assurance Program, ROI CIO.com, computerworld, Meredith Levinson, software support, Training

You can weather the economic downturn lamenting the halcyon days of boundless IT spending and grand tech projects, or you can treat it as a challenge, as a time for reflection and behavior modification. At least that was the sentiment at the recent MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, where CIOs and their ilk met to discuss – what else? – the recession and its effect on the role of the CIO. Read more…

admin Outsourcing, ROI, Tech Babble CIO.com, MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, Outsourcing, Satyam, SearchCIO.com, Wall Street Journal