I’ve witnessed a new growing anxiety within IT departments over the last few years. Apart from worrying about the usual stuff: costs, viruses, delayed projects, handling faults etc etc there is a new challenge – the power home user. The power home user challenges the IT department to provide an IT capability similar to what a user can have at home. At home they typically have a broadband connection, a wireless network, applications in the cloud that can be accessed from anywhere with a mobile device, choice in the browser they use and google provides access to information. All for what they consider a relatively cheap price: £30 a month broadband, £35 a month on a mobile device, the largest expense being the hardware device, £700 – £1000 for a laptop or £300 – £400 for a desktop which they refresh every 2 – 3 years. They don’t care too much about the operating system but are probably on windows XP or Vista which they only upgrade if and when they upgrade their hardware.
This type of user isn’t the geeky type of person who are likely only to reside in the IT department, they are a typical office worker in a standard environment and when they get to work they feel frustrated with the technology they have at their disposal. This type of feeling was experienced by the Obama team when they moved into the White House, where an Obama aide was quoted as saying the gap in technology was comparable to Xbox and Atari.
The type of frustrations power home users experience at work:
They require multiple sign offs or certain managerial ‘privileges’ to receive mobile email access. iphone support is ‘on the IT roadmap’ (translation – will be supported when it is too late)
They are often constricted to a single browser
Company applications are often bespoke and do not support good usability
They try and search their intranet and hardly ever seem to find what they are looking for
The network their office sits on is slow and prone to failure
It takes several minutes to log onto the corporate network
Even greater challenges for the IT department:
The power home user doesn’t even include the cohort of users that are just hitting the workforce, sometime referred to as Generation Y or Millennials, those that have grown up exclusively with the internet, who are likely to find corporate IT provision even more alien to their standard computing consumption.
The question is will business simply shrug it’s shoulders and tell such workers to suck it up or will IT departments adjust their habits and provision to adapt to their growing base of users that demand more?
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