Table of Contents for 101 SecretsII - Axioms and Guidelines.
After you have finished this book and a new problem arises, keeping these basic ideas in mind should help you to structure the problem so that you can find an answer. In addition, I have included a couple of general rules here that did not seem to fit well anywhere else in the book.
Dumb Questions Are Cheaper Than Dumb Mistakes.
Nobody knows everything about PC's. You should not feel that you have to. You need to be willing to admit those areas where you have no experience. There are literally tens of thousands of software packages for PC's. How could anyone know them all, even in a cursory way? If you have no idea what some person is talking about, say so. It takes a strong person to be able to admit to having these gaps in knowledge. If you try this I think you will be pleased with the results. If you were to persist in pretending that you knew everything about PC's, anybody who knows very much about them will quickly see through your pretense. In the worst case you would look foolish.
What you should do is arm yourself with information. This book will discuss several sources of information that you may not be aware of or might not understand the value of. You should seek some of them out and absorb them.
When a hardware or software manual does not make itself clear, do not be afraid to experiment. You cannot accidentally delete Philadelphia. Often manuals are written by programmers who long ago forgot what it was like to be a novice in a particular field. These manuals can be more confusing than helpful. Sometimes the process of trial and error is the fastest way to find out what something means.
Of course, . . .
when in doubt, back it up first. If you are going to try an operation you have never done before, save your current data file under a new name. Then if the operation you tried did delete Philadelphia, you will be able to restore it.
Knowledge Usually Costs.
If you are having trouble with some particular thing, find a local firm where the people seem to be able to help you and want your business, then buy from them. Deep discount stores and mail order houses are for people that carry 5 pens and a screwdriver in their pockets. For most of you, PC's are only tools and not things you enjoy for themselves. You will need the expert help of others from time to time. You should remember that the people in the store need to make a living too, so you should expect to pay for their help when you use it. The extra cost will be worth it in the time and problems it will save you.
On the other hand, since you will be paying for expertise, don't be afraid to demand it and to use it. Ask questions; ask for demo's; ask to try things in your environment. Don't let them ignore you, and don't let them snow you. Remember not to let them use your pride against you. Say "I don't understand that" when you don't understand it. This may surprise them, but it will keep you out of trouble.
People Cost More Than Machines.
Even minimum wage, staff earn at least $10,000 per year. With overhead added in, this level of person will cost $12-15,000. A typical PC is now around $1,000. Anything that helps a person use a computer more easily, more reliably, more comfortably, etc. is going to pay off. It should not be necessary to cost justify every minor difference in capital expenses when the person using the machine costs five to fifty times as much each year as the machine does.
The point is, you should not worry about the small stuff when buying PC's and LAN's. You might be able to save the firm $100 by using a VGA monitor instead of a SVGA. It will be more important to the organization and to your mental health that everyone has the same type of video adapters, that nobody has to suffer with a VGA monitor, and that all your applications, web pages, etc will look the same to all users.
Minimize Differences.
Every time you make a change in a system an incompatibility may arise. If you have several different brands of PC you are more likely to have a problem when something changes. If you have a hundred PC's of five different makes, eight different types of printer, three different video boards, two types of network adapters, and eight different releases of WINDOWS, you will probably have no two machines alike. It is then very likely that anything you change will cause a problem for somebody. If you could get rid of just one or two oddball printers you would improve your odds of success greatly. Diversity can be your undoing. Don't purchase different devices just to save a few dollars on the initial purchase price or to get the latest greatest whizbang gadget. Initial purchase price is often the smallest part of the long term cost of ownership.
Get TOP Management Backing for Your Programs.
As I stated earlier, the world has room for many opinions, the realm of PC's being no exception. Every person who joins your organization that has used a PC before will have ideas about how things "should" work. They will have a favorite word processor, spreadsheet, etc. They will not want to change.
Some of your decisions will be unpopular since they establish firm rules that will infringe on people's pet ideas. The most important thing is to have rules about the use of PC's. It will eventually cost the company much more to have two or three different word processing packages in use than it will to spend a few weeks training two or three new people to use the chosen package. After all, if the company had standardized on a particular phone system would you let each new person choose what brand of phone he wanted to use? Having top management backing lined up in advance for your decisions will allow them to prevail for the most part.
If some new user insists that he will absolutely not use your selected word processing package, the best thing to do is not to fight it. For one thing, his favorite package might have some special new feature that will make it very valuable in your firm's work, and this way you can find out about it. For another thing, most packages can readily exchange documents between the major packages, so this will not be a problem for everyone. You can reasonably insist that this person always send his files to others in the standard format.
What you can do is say that you will not support that user with that package. He will have to find help for any problems from other quarters. This threat is usually enough to dissuade all but the most staunch bigots. If not, you have at least made your point and any problems that arise should be minimized (for you).
Once most of the PC users in a company are computer literate, this will not be a problem. For a truly computer literate person, the transition to a new package is not a big chore. The more packages one learns, the easier it is to see the common features in them and to learn to switch among them without suffering any great loss in productivity.
Arrange to Report to the Chief Executive.
For historical reasons the top computer person in a firm often reports to the top financial executive. This is a big mistake! The chief financial person will too often weight his decisions in favor of the operations he is responsible for. The variety of uses for PC's today should not be constrained by such a limited point of view. Financial input is important, but should not be paramount. If you can manage to report to the chief executive then your boss will have a more balanced perspective. Get the title of Chief Information Operator if necessary.
If you are the Chief Financial officer, I don't know what to suggest.
Most Adults Are Not Computer Literate.
I could give you the keys to my truck and you could probably get in and drive it with little or no trouble or worry. You are automobile literate. So is almost everyone you know. An automobile illiterate or a telephone illiterate is rare in the USA today. Immigrants are an exception to the automobile illiterates, but that’s another story.
My sons will take any program you give them and start using it with minimal instruction. They rarely read the manuals. They have grown up computer literate. I often use three or more different editing programs every week and the change does not (usually) bother me. I am computer literate because I have worked with it for so long. If my father ever touched a computer keyboard in his life I was not aware of it. He would most likely never have become computer literate.
If I asked the average adult computer user to go to my PC and get a certain spreadsheet he might not be able to do it. Even if he had the skill he might be somewhat anxious about whether he would be able to find it. You may be computer literate, but probably fifty percent of the PC users in your firm are not, unless you are in a high-tech business.
Until the average user in your firm is as computer literate as he is automobile literate, you will have to allow for this at every turn. Anything you can do to ease anxiety, foster understanding, increase use, etc., will pay off. For example, it will pay you to have some games or joke type programs on the systems so that people can use the machines for something relaxing and non-threatening. Similarly, you should provide an Internet connection with sufficient bandwidth for people to surf the web during breaks, lunch and outside of normal hours. People who would waste business time playing computer games or surfing the web when they are supposed to be working would probably find other ways to waste their time even if they didn't have the computer. This is a management problem that you should solve other ways than excluding access to such "fun" things.
Human Speed Factors
There are time limits in the ability of a human to interact with systems. For example, if you look up a phone number and then don't get your party on the first try you may have to look up it again. Human short term memory is about seven seconds. If computer systems are slower than this then user error rates will be higher. This time refers to the time starting when a user presses a key ending a major transaction such as entering an invoice until the system has accepted the entry and is ready for more input.
Between the fields on a screen the delay should be less than 3/4'ths of a second. The response to any single key should be under 0.1 seconds. (This does not apply when keying "ahead.")
Response times above these indicate that money is probably being lost because of user frustration and error rates. Money spent on hardware or software that allows performance increases may be easily justified if the system response times are greater than these limits. The seven second delay is the more important number.