Increased IT spending makes productivity worse, and here is why

[Aladdin]

They can, or should be able to check remotely for you.

Yes. I know. I've gone down that route and refused their offer to then call out to look at the laptop.
As said already ... not having anyone inside the house.

It's working enough for what I need and the rest I can manage on my phone.

As an aside..it is amazing how much I have been able to do on phone apps

 

[story]

A tiny little element of this is surely my long-observed paradox that the faster the computers get, the more I seem to have to wait around for my computer. All the extra power gets swallowed up in fancier fluff rather than calculating the same stuff faster. I’m still waiting for the day that my spreadsheets can just instantly update rather than watching the thing say “40% calculated“

Waiting for stuff to happen... I wonder how many minutes and hours of my life I’ve spent watching the machine tell me how much time I’m spending watching the machine.



Hey, remember when Tomorrow’s World told us how streamlined and efficient everything would be in th future with computers? I told a young person this and he looked shocked and then openly scoffed before bending back to his work of setting up a new phone account for me.

 

[David Clapson]

Is anyone going to read the 41 page paper?

 

[Artaxerxes]

Is anyone going to read the 41 page paper?

Jesus no

 

[NoXion]

Is anyone going to read the 41 page paper?

You mean the one with the words "Pre-print not peer reviewed" emblazoned across each page?

 

[tommers]

We sell services to banks for hundreds of thousands of pounds that they then dont use for five months. These institutions are dysfunctional and their IT is just a symptom of that.


Im not sure that you can have an efficient company past a certain number of employees (let's say 500). It just gets exponentially worse.

Aladdin if one of my team tells me their laptop isnt working we send them a new laptop. I mean what the fuck?

 

[Aladdin]

We sell services to banks for hundreds of thousands of pounds that they then dont use for five months. These institutions are dysfunctional and their IT is just a symptom of that.


Im not sure that you can have an efficient company past a certain number of employees (let's say 500). It just gets exponentially worse.

Aladdin if one of my team tells me their laptop isnt working we send them a new laptop. I mean what the fuck?

It's a school. We dont have the kind of money to do that...

 

[Artaxerxes]

Aladdin if one of my team tells me their laptop isnt working we send them a new laptop. I mean what the fuck?

This is another thing, IT can’t fix things or get it working without a budget and the onus is on IT to fix things and get it proven broken before they can replace it.

Hoops and hoops to go through and if your dept isn’t able to afford kit or spend time keeping things up to date things will suffer

Edit: ah Alladin works for a school that explains it, your IT dept will consist of about 3 men and an arthritic dog operating a hodge podge of barely functional off the shelf kit for a couple of hundred machines and a lot of very smart more IT literate kids

 

[ice-is-forming]

Waiting for stuff to happen... I wonder how many minutes and hours of my life I’ve spent watching the machine tell me how much time I’m spending watching the machine.



Hey, remember when Tomorrow’s World told us how streamlined and efficient everything would be in th future with computers? I told a young person this and he looked shocked and then openly scoffed before bending back to his work of setting up a new phone account for me.

I've got a lap top with two desk tops, two intranets, two emails, two SharePoints, four data bases, two teams, two + calanders,
plus a whole heap of excels etc. One of the desktops is a government one, which is for a national service that supports approx one million people with a super high level of personal and sensitive information. And there's an awful lot of workers on it at once It's a nightmare.

Last year I worked out I'd likely spent about a month waiting for pages to load grrrr

 

[Numbers]

We sell services to banks for hundreds of thousands of pounds that they then dont use for five months. These institutions are dysfunctional and their IT is just a symptom of that.


Im not sure that you can have an efficient company past a certain number of employees (let's say 500). It just gets exponentially worse.

Aladdin if one of my team tells me their laptop isnt working we send them a new laptop. I mean what the fuck?

190,000 employees in the firm I work for

 

[tommers]

It's a school. We dont have the kind of money to do that...

Ah ok. Makes more sense.

 

[tommers]

190,000 employees in the firm I work for

Good luck

 

[Numbers]

Good luck

To think the NHS have close to 1.4 million

 

[elbows]

Is anyone going to read the 41 page paper?

Im not that interested in viewing the world through the prism of the Journal of Economic Dynamics & Control.

 

[souljacker]

To think the NHS have close to 1.4 million

Thankfully, no one person is in control of IT for all of them. Although, if they had one central authority, they might have updated those XP machines that got hit by Wannacry a few years back.

 

[Pickman's model]

Is anyone going to read the 41 page paper?

If you'd read it you'd know the last sixteen pages are a bibliography and appendices and the actual text is 25 pages long.

 

[alex_]

Aladdin if one of my team tells me their laptop isnt working we send them a new laptop. I mean what the fuck?

1000% agree with this - a laptop this unreliable is worse than no laptop.

 

[UnderOpenSky]

We sell services to banks for hundreds of thousands of pounds that they then dont use for five months. These institutions are dysfunctional and their IT is just a symptom of that.


Im not sure that you can have an efficient company past a certain number of employees (let's say 500). It just gets exponentially worse.

Aladdin if one of my team tells me their laptop isnt working we send them a new laptop. I mean what the fuck?

That's got to make support easier. Do you get the old one back, sort it out and re issue it?

 

[UnderOpenSky]

It's a school. We dont have the kind of money to do that...

I support a school. They have the most interesting tickets. I was told the USB ports weren't working on a machine. I asked if it was just the front or back and was told it had none on the front.

The machine was facing sideways.

 

[Numbers]

That's got to make support easier. Do you get the old one back, sort it out and re issue it?

That's what we do.

Maybe Aladdin - arrange for a courier or something, we do this if someone can't make it into the office for any reason.

 

[Aladdin]

That's what we do.

Maybe Aladdin - arrange for a courier or something, we do this if someone can't make it into the office for any reason.

I could do that...and I would be left with the courier cost and have no laptop for probably the rest of term.
Nothing will be done until next school year about it. The IT funds were all spent by March this year

 

[kabbes]

Im not sure that you can have an efficient company past a certain number of employees (let's say 500). It just gets exponentially worse.

It’s been done most successfully where companies have managed to create sub-businesses small enough to operate effectively with the feel and organisation of standalone enterprises, but still about to tap the resources and systemic operations of the group. Normally, companies get this horribly wrong, though.

 

[Sue]

To think the NHS have close to 1.4 million

Thankfully, no one person is in control of IT for all of them. Although, if they had one central authority, they might have updated those XP machines that got hit by Wannacry a few years back.

I've been involved in two different NHS projects. One overarching, one at PCT (as was) level. The people I worked with were great but the whole thing was a mess.

(I asked about comeback on a supplier. As in 'if they haven't provided what was contractually agreed, they need to fix it' only to discover the procurement/contract people hadn't specified stuff they should've so there was no comeback. Which meant a ludicrous amount of manual work every month for something that was meant to just work. Madness.)

 

[alex_]

It’s been done most successfully where companies have managed to create sub-businesses small enough to operate effectively with the feel and organisation of standalone enterprises, but still about to tap the resources and systemic operations of the group. Normally, companies get this horribly wrong, though.

This is partly why Dunbar's number: Why we can only maintain 150 relationships

 

[souljacker]

I've been involved in two different NHS projects. One overarching, one at PCT (as was) level. The people I worked with were great but the whole thing was a mess.

(I asked about comeback on a supplier. As in 'if they haven't provided what was contractually agreed, they need to fix it' only to discover the procurement/contract people hadn't specified stuff they should've so there was no comeback. Which meant a ludicrous amount of manual work every month for something that was meant to just work. Madness.)

I find the issue with NHS IT is that they always seem to have someone who has achieved a management position purely based on time spent working there rather than actual knowledge. Those people have a great deal of power that they love to use. Subsequently, we myself or another very experienced consultant comes onsite and designs a good, safe, secure and fast network, they ignore everything you recommend and insist on doing it the way they 'have always done things'. Then the network is shit and they blame us lol.

Also, sales people don't help. They should always have a techie with them during initial meetings otherwise they promise things that are impossible to get the sale. Then we come along and have to tell everyone it will never work and we are the bad people.

 

[tommers]

I find the issue with NHS IT is that they always seem to have someone who has achieved a management position purely based on time spent working there rather than actual knowledge. Those people have a great deal of power that they love to use. Subsequently, we myself or another very experienced consultant comes onsite and designs a good, safe, secure and fast network, they ignore everything you recommend and insist on doing it the way they 'have always done things'. Then the network is shit and they blame us lol.

Also, sales people don't help. They should always have a techie with them during initial meetings otherwise they promise things that are impossible to get the sale. Then we come along and have to tell everyone it will never work and we are the bad people.

Hahaha. I used to run a team of service delivery managers and oh god, the amount of shit the sales team would tell the customers. Or they'd turn up and say "oh yeah, by the way, we've sold this product to this customer and we know that we've never supported that product before and that we can't actually supply it until next month, but you've got an hour call with them tomorrow to go through it all, hope that's OK".

 

[pogofish]

The serious point is that if we'd have settled for the functionality we had at some point in the past (perhaps 2001 with Windows XP?), business productivity would be higher than it is now.

Nah, MS-DOS on a 286, surely..?

 

[Artaxerxes]

The problem with any nhs or government system is always sales and mission creep.

It starts off with a good brief and before you know it another minister comes in and says “make it do x as well as y”* then it needs rewriting at the last minute and so the cycle goes on and delays hit and then another minister shows up…

*it’s always make it, it’s never can it do x?asking the people building the system is to much - always filtered down to them via a dozen meetings and Chinese whispers

 

[alex_]

Messed up post

 

[Sue]

I find the issue with NHS IT is that they always seem to have someone who has achieved a management position purely based on time spent working there rather than actual knowledge. Those people have a great deal of power that they love to use. Subsequently, we myself or another very experienced consultant comes onsite and designs a good, safe, secure and fast network, they ignore everything you recommend and insist on doing it the way they 'have always done things'. Then the network is shit and they blame us lol.

Also, sales people don't help. They should always have a techie with them during initial meetings otherwise they promise things that are impossible to get the sale. Then we come along and have to tell everyone it will never work and we are the bad people.

This absolutely.