Herding short-sighted, selfish sheep is all part of the job

Change is Good.

At least, that's how the old saying goes. The only thing about it is the fact that a lot of people are inherently resistant to change. It's a known fact, given a perfectly comfortable situation, most people would rather stay and maintain the status quo rather than shake it up with something new and different.

Part of my work is IT consultancy. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not yet that well versed in systems to single-handedly handle a large scale IT system in a company, but I did have the opportunity to join one of my superiors in a foray into the er... exciting world of change management.

We were there to oversee the implementation of a large multi-phase computer system that would help streamline operations of a large company, all the way from their purchasing department, through accounting, inventory and sales. Cool stuff.

Unfortunately, while upper management was eyeing the potential efficiency boost from this, middle management and employees were looking at it as something far simpler: "More Work".

So what we have here is no longer just a simple matter of installing a system and training people to use it. Instead we're being prophets, trying to educate people to the potential usefulness of the system. Sure it's not simple, and certainly it takes training to learn how to use properly, but look past that and see the benefits beyond.

Sometimes people can be short-sighted and selfish. It's all down to "What can it do for me?" rather than "What can it help me do for the company?" The better the company runs, the more it can afford to give to it's people. Unfortunately, people don't see that, and prefer to just go and give the minimum amount of work possible, to scrape up their pay.

But still, as consultants, we have to keep at it. In time we'll get them used to it, we'll put the system into practice and make them see that it'll make their work easier, better, faster, and less stressful. We just have to keep going, pile on the inertia, until we reach a new state of equilibrium... hopefully one that focuses on continual improvement.

Catch phrases don't equate to communication

It's a sad fact in the business world that sooner or later, you will run into a client or boss who'se idea of communication is to slather as many catch phrases into a single sentence as humanly possible.

A co-worker of mine just ran into a client like that and now I'm dealing with the fallout. The culprit catch phrase of today?

"Multi-Tagging"

To which I secretly think to myself... What The Fuck?

As an Information Architect, I'm pretty sure I know what the hell a Tag is in the context of navigation and websites. But hey, for the sake of clarity let's see what Wikipedia has to say about it:

A tag is a keyword or descriptive term associated with an item as means of classification by means of a folksonomy. Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by the author/creator of the item — i.e. not usually as part of some formally defined classification scheme. Tags are typically used in dynamic, flexible, automatically generated internet taxonomies for online resources such as computer files, web pages, digital images, and internet bookmarks (both in social bookmarking services, and in the current generation of web browsers - see Flock and Mozilla Firefox 2.0x). For this reason, "Tagging" has become associated with the Web 2.0 movement.

All well and good. Tags are a very popular feature in most sites right now, YouTube and Flickr being very good examples.

Now let's try our friend's "Multi-Tagging" through Wikipedia...

Huh.

No Results.

That's okay, maybe he's working with a different vocabulary. Let's try Google...

Nothing, but there is a rather interesting article here:

"Electrochemical Multi-Tagging of Cysteinyl Peptides during Microspray Mass Spectrometry: Numerical Simulation of Consecutive Reactions in a Microchannel"

Apparently, our client somehow wants us to apply an extremely sophisticated Chemistry procedure involving Microspray Mass Spectrometry to build a website.

Wonderful.

Seriously though, I can't help but get a tad peeved, but that might just be me.

Blog Dungeon Hack 2

Okay, now that I've gotten some responses, time to get continue this:

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You light your torch, holding it up and slightly forwards as you make your way down to the corridor to your right. The sounds of water behind you fade as you continue, the path sloping downwards a little bit until you reach a room. The door is left open, and the flickering torchlight reveals that the room inside is some sort of torture chamber.

Rusted shackles hang from the walls, and the rack is rotting away. There's a distinct smell of rotten flesh that hangs in the air, and the door creaks as you open it. To the far end of the room lies a corpse, rotten to the point that makes it difficult to tell what gender the person may have been before. Beside the corpse is a closed door, apparently the only other exit to this room.

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Anything you guys want to do in the chamber? or do you simply proceed past the door?