I love the articles about lost productivity during the NCAA tournament. First off, I love the tournament, we turn it on here at the office and don’t think twice about hanging out with our colleagues for few minutes watching it. But every year there is a spate of articles about how productivity gets crushed by the tourney, which of course is bogus. A good article in Slate deconstructing the clever PR machine that generates this annual hand wringing.(March Madness and bogus stats about worker productivity. – By Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine)
That said, there are lots of real technology problems that are a huge time suck that seemingly go under the radar screen. If you want to talk about productivity loss, here are some of the real culprits. Not just because they are time consuming, but because they are time consuming, and then they don’t work!
- Poor technology buying processes. Or actually, no technology buying process. “People here just do what they want”
- Multiple databases for the same case. Just the documents have multiple databases, transcripts are a separate database in a separate application of course.
- Highlighting transcripts. Dozens of people billing hundreds of hours to color. And color badly by the way.
- Physically applying stickers to documents. Can’t we get a montesorri class in here to do it?
- No databse at all, the old “digging through boxes technology” model. Let your fingers to the walking. Because humans scan and index information better than computers.
- A separate virtualized OS when running local versus tied into the network matrix. A law firm IT special. Unspeakable time drain.
- Trial teams too busy to plan their technology. Like the lumberjack too busy to sharpen the axe.
- An entire courtroom watching a disorganized lawyer fumble through a binder. A huge cost to our legal system.
- Checklists for software purchases
- Network protocols. Release and renew your IP address and maybe you can access our system. Blech.
- Installing an OS, wiping a hard drive, finding drivers. I’d rather have a stick in the eye.
- Downloading and installing a patches at inopportune times (are you ready to reboot?)
- Comparing specs on anything. A totally manic inducing time flusher.
- RFP processes when companies are just looking for spec consulting work. Really, its not nice.
- Technology committees. Need I say more.
- In-person demo’s, I’ve given dozens of these, and while I love because it gets me out of the office and talking to people, on more than one occassion I’ve wondered if its isn’t an elaborate ploy to allow people to ask dumb questions and not feel bad about it.
- Did I just read a tweet that someone lost their glasses? Sheesh.
