Week 1 Discussion Comments

I would like to highlight the comments made in several areas.

Excel: This is not a course in Excel but as you pointed out, it is a very useful tool and Excel knowledge can help in job interviews. If you have any questions about Excel including some beyond the scope of this course, feel free to email me.

Medical Records: You mentioned Northshore University Healthcare. My Doctor had to greatly improve her typing skills when all charting became electronic. From a patient's point-of-view, the new system seems to be much better organized and the system automatically displays follow-up information based on what happened in prior visits. You also gave an example of two systems being used because doctors would not give up an system that they already knew. \

Switching costs between systems can be very high. That's why vendors like Oracle and SAP work so hard to get an initial sale. Once you are using their system, it is almost impossible to switch.

 

Change Management : You gave examples of resistance to change including the use of paper Policy Manuals after their content became obsolete because only the electronic version was being maintained. An important step in implementing a new system is to make sure that the old one is shutdown. As this example shows, this is not as easy as it sounds.

Salon: You also gave an example of a Salon that kept track of appointments and financial records manually. Something that is so technically simple as an electronic appointments system could become difficult because of Chanage Management issues. Also, if the system is on local hardware, what are the fallback procedures if the local hardware fails. Even if the appointments are stored "in the cloud" such as on Google Calendar, how will the Salon operate if the local computer which accesses the appointments in the cloud fails. Getting a system up and running and keeping it running is always more complex than installing some software and doing the initial training.

Fallback: You gave an example of a school trying to register all of the students' iPads at once. The sudden volume crashed the network. This highlighted the need for prior volume testing. It also emphasizes the importance of fallback plans for when systems fail.

Personal Opinion: Not all IT Specialists need an MBA or business knowledge. I would rather have a Network Specialist had the appropriate CISCO certifactions than one that had an MBA. CISCO is the leading IT Network hardware/software company and defines the way that most corporate networks are configured.

What is an IT Specialist: Think beyond a person that fixes printers or Excel problems or recovers lost passwords. Instead, think of specialists in Enterprise Resource Planning Systems such as SAP and database management systems such as Oracle, Learning Management Systems such as Blackboard. Some IT specialits would be skilled in planning, building, and configuraing data centers with racks and racks of servers and disk drives that fill a large building. Others are very skilled in certain programming languages or in managing complex software development projects.

Computer specialists: I have been both a compute specialist and a manager at various times in my career. If a computer system is being designed or implemented for your department, DO NOT decide you "don't have time" to work on it. As you saw in the Discussion, computer specialits will probably not understand your business or your department and therefore will implement something that could be painful to use. Become actively involved with the design decisions, training plans, and implementation schedules.