I have a favourite birthday card that I send to like minded chums, via the post, which has a nice sepia photo of an elegant lady from the 20s with a typewriter, and the caption reads "It was a hard day at the office - the computers went down and everyone had to learn to think again". I am no technology Luddite - but the truth of that statement is frightening. If my ADSL box goes down so I can't access the Internet and e-mail, or even worse I have to close down all computers as there is a thunderstorm near by, work stops.
Another situation where technology drives success was noted on a report on the BBC website about difficulties faced by community and voluntary organisations using the e-procurement system of the Learning and Skills Council. While many organisations got through it fine, a small but significant number had problems with system crashes and lost work. While the system saved an estimated 3 million sheets of paper, it has also caused heartache and stress to a number of organisations who didn't deserve it.
I fully applaud Rob Wye's unconditional apology on the system, but am a bit more worried by the attitude of the anonymous company that designed and implemented the system. Their view was that any problems were entirely the fault of the users.
Now when I worked with similar systems from within the LSC, and I had community and voluntary organisations on at my team about the awfulness of the systems we were forcing them to use, one of my team would go out to see what was going wrong and do some training with the organisation that was having problems. Or they would come back and say what the problem was - often dial up modems, dodgy telephony, or computers that were more than 2 years old. While such issues might be the user's fault in some ways, the desire for bigger, better, faster technology and the need to upgrade every year or so is as much of a waste as the 3 million sheets of paper. For a community or voluntary organisation, the cost of keeping up diverts resources from doing good.
When I worked at British Gas many years ago (here is the techie bit), I used to run multiple regression models with approximately 10 variables including an autoregressive term and using large data sets, and I could design them on a single sheet lotus worksheet (NOT a workbook), and I could run them on a PC with a 286 processor (remember those?). It was a bit slow, but it could be done, and the results could be thought about, and the worksheet could be backed up on a floppy disk with 384Kb capacity.
Today I worked on a model for community and voluntary organisations to understand demand for learning, using computer power that is greater than that which powered an Apollo space rocket. However when I looked at the quality of the data I was working with, an abacus might have been more practical!
With all this technology around, you have to hope that from time to time the brain pitches in, looks at what you are doing, and says "that's garbage!"
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