An Educated Consumer is our Best Customer(R)

No sorry, this isn’t about Syms Corp, a US discount clothing retailer that’s been in business for about 50 years throughout the north eastern, middle Atlantic regions and in the Midwest, Southeast and the Southwest.

I grew up hearing their commercial and this tag-line and it’s stuck with me ever since. It really applies to technology more than ever. With the ever quickening pace of technology products being introduced commercially for personal and corporate use, the “every day” user needs to be very literate. And most unfortunately are not. Since dumbing down the product isn’t feasible (you can’t sell it, nor raise the price), then the only hope is for the IT departments to find ways to get user acceptance up.

I think that’s an area we in the corporate IT space don’t pay a lot of attention to. We more or less just take what the technology vendors give us and we find a way to digest it. Except you can’t. Our brain capacities are finite and limited – by culture, background, education, personal preferences etc – so how do we raise user adoption rates of technology higher? I posted something about this several months ago on my company’s corporate intranet in response to a marketing user’s invitation to talk about how IT can be improved to assist in the modernization of the company. Back then, I said that instead of discussing internally focused IT issues, it would make a lot more sense if we found a way to have better educated business users who could discuss IT technologies with their IT colleagues. At the moment, many/most do not or cannot. It’s mightily painful to have business users think that setting up a SAP ERP system is like “copying and pasting” from a previous SAP ERP system we set up for a similar business unit. Like we do for desktop PCs (i.e. ghosting images)! they are irrate and incredulous when you tell them that no, it’s a wrong analogy and insisting on faster, cheaper, better quality, more flexibility and no user documentation required is not only not possible but a route to disaster.

Check out Mike Schaffner’s blog where he asked the same question recently: Breaking the Paradigm: How Do You Get People To See The Possibilities Of New Technologies?

So then folks, how DO we educate our users better with all the technologies coming out in 3-6 months cycles when our corporate IT systems are 3-6 years out of touch? This is one bridge between IT and business we should definitely pay more attention.