[Jim McGee] shares much insight on the mental challenges for end users learning Knowledge Management. QUOTE For most people, computers have more possibility, than they have real practical utility. UNQUOTE This then begs the question WHY and what can be done to fix this.
Our mental models evolve thanks to input such as the above links.
- Traditional education in computer literacy may be flawed.
- Users in the work place learn from other users, who may be good at what they do, but not good as instructors.
- This invariably leads to holes in what gets communicated.
- The new person learns how to do things under normal circumstances, with how to cope when things go wrong is often set aside for later, allowing time for them to get comfortable with the overall work flow. But invariably the new person is faced with something going wrong, long before the structure of their education addresses how we have learned to cope with some problems that do reoccur.
- Structure of Documentation, originally designed for Experts, in need of redesign for different audiences. Part of this is figuring out how best to utilize new tools for organizing information.
- Structure of Learning Environments failure to acknowledge and effectively deal with the notion that different people learn best different ways, and how do we identify what those ways are for potential students?
- The biggest mental bottleneck that I have seen when I have been trying to explain Weblogging to other people, is that most people tend to forget that computer technology is a moving target. We learn that as we move away from academia, the value of what we learned is eroded, but most of us forget that anything we have learned about computer know-how is eroded extremely rapidly, such that anything and everything we learn which was perfectly valid when we learned it, can become plain wrong a few years later.
- This begs the question of how best to structure continuing education to help people identify what is now wrongful data influencing their decision making.
- This is an extremely critical question when applied to Homeland Security, as I have previously alluded to, and plan to address in other essays.
- A few short years ago the World Wide Web did not exist. It is a relative newcomer on the Internet scene, but most everyone I know, who uses the Internet, takes it for granted. The PC was invented after the Internet had been around for a while, and the original inventors computer ingredients were almost 200 years ago (Babbage, Lovelace, Hollerith), but their equipment and tools would be unrecognizable to a computer user of today. It is quite possible that what we call computers today will be unrecognizable to the computer users of 50 years from now, unlike in transportation and most other technologies, where the basic form does not change much over time.
- An old friend, whom I have not seen for several years, was a teacher of nurses and medical students at a hospital. She would tell me that newcomers to medicine had no sense of history. They would learn about the latest medicines and treatments, then be studying a case from a couple of years ago, and ask why the treatment they learned yesterday was not used in that case. Well it had not been invented yet. A lot of this wonderful stuff that you are learning is also new to the old medical staff.
- Well there is the same kind of thing in computer technology. There is all this new stuff that did not exist as a possibility a few years ago, and many people who learned what could be done with computers are in need of regular refresher classes in what new stuff has come along most recently.
- The easiest way I know to pick up appreciation for computer possibilities is to go to the traveling shows organized by the major computer vendors, such as IBM, that shows business people here is what can be done RIGHT NOW with their hardware and software. These shows hit all the major cities, and come back around 3-6 months later, because that is how fast their reality changes, and there is whole new stuff to communicate.
- As more and more people want or need some computer feature, be it application integration, simple computer communications, your own web site, the larger customer base means more vendors offering products that make it extremely easy for someone with no technical background to do what used to require a high priced specialist. But when, in recent memory, something is very expensive, or needs heavy duty training to accomplish, many people are not ready to accept that we are crossing a thresh hold to a new reality, and that this is a continuing fact of life.
- This goes beyond Future Shock.
- The last time I had a major upgrade to my home PC, I was telling my supplier that I wanted to keep my old monitor because I liked it so much, and I need not buy a replacement keyboard ... further discussion led me to the discovery that between the previous time I had to buy a keyboard, and the latest aquisition, the price had dropped from like $250.00 to $10.00. All the more reason why I question a management decision to save a few bucks on each user's equipment by not giving them all the features available for rapid keyboarding. I believe the big cost in the work place is anything that impairs the people productivity, and trying to save $10.00 a person on the equipment on their desk top means a much larger loss per person in productivity in even one day of this, let alone years and years.
- However, as shown later in this essay, there is also an issue of teaching the people how to effectively use the keyboarding resources that are available and have been purchased.
- Of late there has been an interest in reviewing what software has been aquired, and how to use it more effectively. I think there is an even more basic thing that should be reviewed, and that is work flow at the interface of human and computer.
- Today anyone can afford a UPS, but I remember a couple decades ago trying to persuade my management to consider getting one, at a time when the cost was ONE HUNDRED TIMES more expensive than they are today. What made the difference was primarily growth in customer base, leading to economies of scale. I can say the same for many peripherals people take for granted today.
- But people remember how expensive this or that used to be the last time they considered getting something, without absorbing how dramatically the costs have shifted, and that memory is a bar today to even considering it.
- I think there is a need for a new kind of management document that evaluates the costs that weigh in on one possible approach vs. another, in which the costs of the ingredients can be depicted showing as of current reality, and at various points in past budget cycles, so that there is visibility of shifting weight in favor of a particular decision and trend lines as to whether this is getting cheaper or more expensive, so as to influence timing of applying some decision.
- I suspect academia is especially vulnerable to teaching what makes sense based on an understanding of price trade offs in the quicksand reality of computer pricing and possibilities evolving very rapidly.
- I think academia might be the logical place for researchers to explore the new kind of decision making document that I have proposed.
- Where I now work, there are over 1 million blue prints in file cabinets. These are the huge things that if you lay them on a conference table, the table is not big enough for the whole thing. Yet big as they are, somehow people occasionally manage to misfile them. Several years ago I suggested that we move the whole library to a CD Rom Juke Box
- (that's where you have a rack of CD Roms, and the software knows which Disk to insert into slot so as to access the data) to be attached to the network, so that any worker could access any blueprint at any time, and misfilings would be a thing of the past.
- Well when I first suggested this, it was too expensive, and there were issues of scanner unreliability when dealing with those large documents. The price has come crashing down, and the reliability skyrocketing up. However, disk space to access the software to access the various tools, is still a price bottleneck.
- I think there is room for rethinking client server resource allocation in a world where every desk top has unused resources and the whole enterprise is hurting for some resources.
- Some day my company will be ready to accept the merits of my proposal, but there are always the people who remember the reasons why we could not do this a few years ago, who are at risk of being blind to what has changed in the interim, just like I was blind to the drop in keyboard prices.
- We need to be able to analyse common error patterns, without the blame game distraction, then figure out corporate solutions.
- I am in a multi-user network with queues for user consumption of shared resources, whose access is optimized to maximize productivity by people currently connected to the system, such that there are delays for resources provided to work queues where processing does not need human interaction. For new users whose past experience was standalone systems, they have a significant learning curve to appreciate the fact that all these different kinds of queues exist (program execution, printer sequencing) both in system and in users (someone walks off with THEIR reports, but in between some pages is someone else's reports).
There may be value in evaluating how people around us have stumbled in learning how best to utilize technology. The following are examples from my own career, some from current employer, and many from earlier work experiences.
- We have talked before, earlier in my Brain to Brain category about the fear of work place blame game. I have seen people who seem to prefer to do nothing, than risk being a target of the perceived blame game. I have seen people do serious analysis of things that go wrong, in which they personally are blameless, and when you combine the input from several such analyses, we have meaningful data to act upon, but some managers focus on the commonality of each analysis being that the analyst is blameless, without dealing with the specific problems that they found.
- Multi-user creation and use of shared queries, spread sheets, and so forth in the networked business world, where one person creates a tool for a specialized need, then other people, who are less cognizant of tool creation, end up using those tools for other purposes, with potentially flawed output.
- I find it disturbing that there is an almost total lack of estimating skills or support for the notion that everything should be tested - existing tools that we use in our daily work, and new tools that get added - to validate that the output we are getting from them is in fact correct output.
- I have found it extremely disturbing to find this mind set among software designers at major computer vendors, leading to systemic bug blindness.
- I think it is a well known fact within the Computer Science Profession that the biggest bottleneck to getting accurate information into corporate data bases is the end user interface, and user interaction with warning messages that the software delivers with respect to data inconsistencies.
- I have talked about this with many managers, and it seems to me that there is a conceptual problem, where I am being accused of calling people idiots, or some topics are taboo because of perceived blame game. Very few co-workers have got it, with respect to what I was trying to communicate.
- For example, we have redesigned some input screens so that the same amount of work can flow into the system with 1/3 as many keystrokes, and we have redesigned reports to review the veracity of input so that it can be checked in 1/10 the human time. It took me YEARS to get permission to develop these improvements, because of this conceptual misconception as to what I was seeking to accomplish by discussing the bottlenecks and what I thought could be done about them.
- Some people have a mental barrier with respect to AND OR Boolean Logic. In practical business terms, you want to put a translator between them and the computer, because otherwise we are just about guaranteed bad results.
- I have run into several managers, over several decades, in which I was unable to get across to them that they use AND OR logic one way, and this system they using use it a DIFFERENT WAY and the way to get the computer to tell you what you want, is to couch your requests within the structure of this computer software, which really is very simple to define. But they seem locked into continuing to ask what are flawed commands of the computer, in terms of how the software is designed to function.
- The scary thing about this is that I only found out about these problems because these individuals asked me to figure out what was wrong with their output, and my conclusion was that is was flawed input by them. How many people are in this boat and not asking for help?
- Occasionally I have taken the time to just watch what the users of software that I have tinkered with are doing, to get some insight into how it can be further improved.
- In the process I have been horrified to witness some people with poor keyboarding skills. How long have they been doing this? Years perhaps. Who taught them this, and how many other people have been taught the same way? There are key combinations that can get the cursor to a specific location on an input screen, with at most 2-3 keystrokes, but here I see someone moving the cursor one position at a time, effectively doing 100 times as many keystrokes than are neccessary to get the job done.
There may also be value in evaluating what has led to us learning computers effectively. Can any of this insight be extended to other potential students?
- I watched other people perform some tasks, in which they explained stuff as they went along. I became eager to want to do that myself. The people, who were doing the showing, they had some teaching skills.
- Net Change documents are developed and distributed. These itemize what is different between our current system and something else that many users may have been familiar with in past work experiences.
- I have a document at work in which I can look up by subject, things that can go wrong, and how we have figured out is the best way to resolve that scenario. My challenge has been how to make that document available to my co-workers, while keeping the content structured so it is efficient for my use. Ultimately I believe this sort of thing belongs in a system that a search engine can hit.
- The first computer club that I was a member of - it developed a skills bank, a directory of members who had specific know how and experience in various nuances of various hardware and software. If any of us got into difficulty, we could look up the skills bank index to find fellow members with relevant know-how, then call them up and get rapid assistance.
- 2-3 years ago we were suffering thousands of misposted transactions a week, in which it took a few minutes to generate a thousand errors, but half a day to post the corrections. Now we are down to months between incidents of misposting. This is because of dual solutions. One technical, one management.
- The technical solution was to have the software intercept error conditions and apply generic actions instead of surprising users with geeky choices.
- The management solution was a combination of imposing some rules about how the queues were to be used, and recognizing that when people are faced with disruptions to their daily routine, we can have an epidemic of other people who get disturbed, as the initial victims seek to disassociate themselves with any risk of being targeted by the blame game, when the real game should be how to get the job done with zero tolerance for errors. Making a fuss about occasional errors can lead to a higher incidence of errors.
- Many companies have had the computer resources to support a test environment, that can be used for teaching end users. Ideally the test environment can be replicated regularly so that it is a sampling of say 5% of the production environment transactions replicating all combinations possible, so that users can be educated in everything, without replicating the same consumption of computer resources. While it is Ok for them to delete stuff in the test environment and make all sorts of mistakes, with no harm, there are dual problems of people knowing whether they in test or production (we have had people screw up in production when they thought they in test) and the notion that we not want to encourage behaviors in general through the education environment that are inappropriate in the real work place.
- I have suggested (not really implemented yet that I have seen, except in a few cases where it was helpful to me for testing new software modifications), that for every real criteria in a company (item, warehouse, facility, department, etc.) we create a TEST criteria, in which the General Ledger would be told to ignore any quantity or dollar value associated with transactions in those criteria. Then if someone wants to figure out how to do something, they can use the TEST item in the TEST department to see if their idea has merit.
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