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I’ve been experiencing a lot of negative friction recently with technology. Fundamentally, it comes down to the fact that our organization does not standardize. The failure to pick a product and commit resources to it means that we—well, let me say I, at least—waste time trying to navigate myriad systems. People may not like standardization for its constraints but it’s the right answer when productivity is the goal.
The thing that is staggering to me is how counter-intuitive all of it is. I realize that for-profit organizations are not necessarily better at it than not-for-profits but there is a financial benefit to trimming the number of supported options. Not only do you keep your licensing and probably infrastructure costs down (someone is paying for all of that storage), you provide a simpler toolset for your people and your IT team doesn’t have to support three of every type of application.
Lexis used to do workplace research and they consistently found that one of the things that people (including lawyers) spent hours and hours looking for information. Filing information and retrieving it, hunting for emails and documents that you or someone else has stashed somewhere.
It’s been 16 years and none of these feel like a surprise to me. I would have been fascinated to know—although I don’t think it was asked—how much of this information retrieval latency is caused by complicated and conflicting systems. They did ask about what mitigations the firms were taking and those also are no surprise. In particular, integrated tools were only identified by about one-third of American respondents.
I have to believe that, in the eternal war of information technology standardization and the “I-want-what-I-want” shadow IT in every organization, these numbers are softened when standardization loses. This does not mean that IT organizations should embrace Mordac, the Denier of Information Services. The goal should not be to restrict functionality. Instead, the aim should be to create a large and well-integrated set of technology tools so that each primary function is only found in one application.
Welcome to My World
I spent a few years in San Diego and that was perhaps the best technology environment I’ve ever worked in. This was due to strong planning but also there was the economic constraint. It didn’t make sense to license two of anything. I find that this is frequently not the case, in part because technology standardization requires IT leadership and decision-making that is often missing. It seems easier to just pay for a second—or a third—service than to make a decision that will be greeted with employee dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, the longer this state is allowed to exist, the more investments will be made in each of the allowed technologies, making any future consolidation harder.
Meetings
Microsoft Teams or Zoom or Google Meet? At this moment, I am fielding meetings on all of those from people within the university. Each one has to be kept up to date and managed. As I find every time I unplug my laptop to go to another room to join a hybrid call, you have to continually re-set the video and audio settings for each app with each new configuration. When I return to my PC, I have to repeat the process.
It’s not just the actual meeting. Since we have not standardized on Teams, sometimes people send a meeting request assuming a Teams meeting but do not toggle on the Teams switch to signal that. Or they do switch it on but they also send their Zoom account link. Each virtual meeting app has its own backgrounds, its own customization and approach to raising a hand or accessing chat or recording. It is set and forget so long as it works.
Storage
Google Drive or Box or Microsoft Sharepoint via 365. I am working with a group and it is using Google Docs, in particular, a spreadsheet, a Google Sheet. Well, it sounds like sheet, anyway. Here’s the thing about the web apps: they are not as full featured as desktop apps. At least with Microsoft you can potentially use Excel or Word. In this case, the information manager was committed to Google Drive and its storage. We have corporate accounts so I can sign in and work on those documents but I have not yet found that they convert well to Excel if I download them.
Most of the University of Illinois seems to use the Box.com storage facility, which has to be one of the worst cloud storage options possible. Box indexes 10kb of the text of any document and the search feels abysmal for it. I regularly cannot find files that I know I have uploaded but the location of which I cannot recall. I cannot hide or archive folders that are shared with me, so even though I only have about 5 folders on Box, I regularly have to navigate a list (that seems unsorted most of the time) of all of the folders that have ever been shared with me.
Communications.
Fortunately, this is mostly email. Until it’s not. Our library team uses Teams channels because I find them a good way to have discussions out in the open and store the information for the future. I regularly search our channels and hope that new staff will be able to scan them to find historic knowledge as we experience staff turn over. For me, that’s all the communication I want.
The reason I prefer those two methods is because they are asynchronous. I do not need to be on the site. I do not need to learn a third system to communicate. This is not true for everyone. Some people prefer chat, so I will get random chat messages instead of phone calls but, if I’m away from my desk, I do not see them since they’re not visible in my email inbox. Some folks email me or send a chat and their entire message is “call me”, a situation that sometimes results in me calling and having to leave a voice mail (or not) since they chose a synchronous communication method without committing to remain available on it.
The solution to communications across multiple platforms seems to be notifications. This has to be the worst solution possible. Email is already hard enough to manage without flooding it with “you have a new message on platform X” and “another on platform Y”. It’s one reason I turn all notifications off. I plan time to go to each platform—for the library, it’s email and Teams; for my class, it’s email and the Canvas LMS; for my work with AALL, it’s email and the AALL website—and deal with the work that is present. Notifications are the downfall of productivity, the murderers of flow.
Can We Meet?
Yes, I’d love to meet. Please use the Microsoft Outlook calendar Scheduling Assistant to confirm when we are both (all) available. What is that you say, some of our colleagues (you?) do not share their calendars with anyone so we can’t use it? Then please do not be that person that sends the meeting emails:
- Email 1: Hi, can we meet?
- Email 2: Yes, let’s meet. When are you available?
- Email 3: I’m available at X and Y. When are you?
- Email 4: I’m available at Z and A. What about B and C?
- Email 5: I can do C, tentatively.
- Email 6: I’ll send you a meeting request.
No. No. No. If you want to meet with someone and their calendar is not available, send them a meeting request as your opening gambit. They can always counter and propose a new time that’s more convenient. Then when you meet them, you can tell them to turn on their calendar visibility. It just shows grey bars, people, not any details.
If that’s not available, we end up in the group calendaring. Doodle? MeetWithMe? Calendly? These make sense when you do not work in the same organization. If you are on the same instance of Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, you do not need those apps. Unless you do because your work culture does not encourage (or mandate) the bare visibility of individual calendars. I have to admit I may take this to the extreme but every email I send out has a Booking link on it. Anyone can use it, no account necessary. I work a 9 to 5 job, give or take, and it is not that hard to find me whether or not people can see my calendar.
Standardization is Good For You. Eat Up.
I do not like all of the software we use at this workplace. I didn’t like it when I had to use Lotus Notes for email (it’s not an email client) just because the CEO wouldn’t change to Microsoft Exchange. Weirdly, I worked at two lawyer-run organizations where the CEO (different CEOs) refused to relinquish Lotus Notes for Outlook and Exchange. I don’t like Adobe Acrobat. I don’t like Teams or Google Chrome.
But you know what, sometimes you go with the flow. I have been on the IT side of all of this and it is a nightmare to try to support multiple products all of which are doing the same thing. Compatability issues, installation issues, customization and configuration issues. If you want highly responsive IT people, narrow your organization’s software and hardware down to as tight a collection as you can. It gives them an opportunity to build expertise without constantly wading through multiplicities of variables.
Similarly, it makes people more productive when they are not trying to relearn different interfaces and platforms. We have seen this in the law library where people struggle with research products that they have not used in 6 months or a year. How does the search work? How do I fine tune my research? Where do I store it? It’s bad enough we do it with our primary research tools, let alone our communications and storage and meeting tools as well.
Automation may make us more productive. AI may make us more efficient. But simple choices to use highly integrated, single instances of types of apps can be just as time-saving and also come with lowered license, maintenance, training, and support costs. Sometimes we have to do things—like eating brussel sprouts or some other food we don’t care for—because it makes sense for the organization and, in the end, for our own productivity.