A well-formed tool

A well-formed tool is better than instructions and administration.  Write it on your diary.

I am often amazed at the bone-headed mis-apprehension administrators of information companies seem to make.  Several Australian banks out-sourced their IT departments.  They would have done better to realise the IT was all there was of them.  Really, maintaining the massive data set and supporting data transactions is the business: all the rest (rates, fees, tellers, branches, big financing deals) is window dressing.

Equally amazing is the sheer bulk of the Australian system of laws.  Just the tax code can crush you to coal.  Of all these laws, only the tax code comes with even modest equipment for compliance.  With e-tax, the tax department save everyone the horrors of reading instructions and filling out dumb forms that you have to do your own additions on.  Brilliant.

Recently at work, a manager was complaining that the centralised work of data maintenance for a particular administrative task was likely to be pushed out to her workers, so that instead of filling out the form for the change and faxing it off, they would have the entire responsibility for making the change in the database.  I asked why this person could fill out the form with all the necessary details and yet another person needed to be involved to effect the change.  The answer seemed to be that the tool was clumsy and great skill was required in its use.

Please, if you run a large company, invest in the tools you want your people to use.*  Don't issue an instruction that has no correspondence in the tools they will use.  Don't accept Microsoft's idea that an electronic typewriter (Word), electronic  folders and email (and its folders) are a logically satisfying pairing for handling words in your office - why are they even a pair?  They are a pair because of it was easier to design and sell two programs to replicate administrative processes recognizable from hundreds of years ago, than to invent and sell a new way of working to senior folks.

More and more, a professional information worker with no programming skills will be like a manual worker without hands.

* Also, you might want to think about where you're getting your advice.  I am just some nut on the internet.