Not had chance to get a post up over the last few weeks, sorry about that, so I thought I’d start with a nice suggestive title!! Better explain myself, I have a gripe, a bee in the bonnet if you will with the IT industry!
What, me a techie with a gripe, yep, who knew!
I’ve mentioned more than once in recent BLOGS about this great little show I watched on Sky 1, OAP Internet Virgins (I’m convinced I may be the only person who’s ever seen it!) the message of this show was how simple technology, used in the right way, was an extremely powerful tool, powerful enough to change someone’s world.
I really loved that message and since seeing the show, I keep seeing enterprise IT examples of when technology, even really good and clever technology is just too complicated for the user and I don’t just mean end users, I mean enterprise admins, who are spending unnecessary time carrying out tasks that could be done much more quickly if the technology was more straightforward and intuitive.
Shouldn’t Enterprise IT admins know better though? The challenge for lots of these guys is that enterprises, from the smallest to the very largest, tend to employ IT generalists and never enough of them, the challenge for the generalist is they have an awful lot of technology to learn, manage and maintain and rarely get the chance to spend enough time with it to get to know it better.
If you run an IT department, why should you care? Well, you certainly should – if it’s to complex, it takes too long, that costs more than it should, your IT guys are then spending time carrying out admin tasks, rather than doing work than can add value to your organisation and all because the technology was too hard!
The problem isn’t only one for users though, what about suppliers of technology, well think, if your solution is complex and hard to use it starts to cost too much, gives the user a poor experience and if your solution is tricky and hard work, then that customer may think twice about staying with you, if you can give them tech, that just works, is easy to do and makes their lives easier, then they are staying with you for the long haul.
It’s not just enterprise IT though where we see the problem that complicated tech is 
unsustainable. Some of you know I went over to Orlando for a family holiday earlier in the year (thought I’d mention it…again!) during our visit, we went to my favourite place in the world, Kennedy Space Centre – we saw the fantastic Space Shuttle Atlantis in it’s new home, awe inspiring and fabulous, so why was it hanging as a museum item, rather than continuing space missions?
A few weeks after we got back, I heard an interview with a Director at NASA talking about the end of the Space Shuttle Program, the reason
It’s too complicated and too expensive
Yep, for NASA, it was too hard… too hard for rocket scientists! Why? because it took thousands of people to make a shuttle mission work and thousands of people cost lots of money and that was NASA’s problem, they couldn’t maintain such a commercially unsustainable model for space flight, hence the space shuttle program heads off into the history books.
What’s the point of all this griping? – Well this has sent me off on a little mission (excuse the pun!), to look at how, as a technology provider, we can work with our customers, technology users and partners to make life easier.
There’s some great examples of how technology is simplifying the user experience , the iPad maybe more than any other recent bit of technology shows how tech when delivered well and easily for the user is a real game changer.
The increasing use of cloud services is another, if you’ve ever looked at the Azure or Amazon market places, you’ll know how easy it is to provision services, services that would take days, weeks and months to deliver on-premises.
Last week I presented on Microsoft’s behalf to around 100 accountancy businesses in West Bromwich, the subject was the importance of data security to the financial services sector, presenting solutions to this challenge two years ago would of been quite a different prospect, however, now, I’m able to talk about how the wide range of data protection capabilities built into Office365 could really enhance the data protection options for a small business, providing capabilities that a couple of years ago where the preserve of big companies who could afford the complexity of setting up things like Information Rights management, data protection templates and device management, today, 365 gives all organisations the ability to, with the press of a couple of mouse buttons, a whole range of capabilities, life changing, well maybe not, but providing simple and easy protection to your business, absolutely.
As part of my mission I thought over the next few posts I’d show a couple of examples of some of the smart attempts out there to make enterprise IT that little bit easier.
But also I’d love to hear from elsewhere about what puts a bee in your IT bonnet? What can tech providers do to make your IT life easier? and what bits of tech have you seen that is doing a good job in making your enterprise technology life easier and more effective? So please, leave a comment on here with some examples, or if you don’t want to share here, email me, or drop me a message on LinkedIn or Twitter.
And then together perhaps technology can make your life easy, easy like Sunday morning….
Techstringy 
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