Reading my colleague Amanda Sachtleben's blog about being stranded in a rural area without tech toys reminds me of an IT disaster I was witness to last year.
The previous company I worked for decided to merge with two other publishing companies. We were promised by the management that the IT systems would all be up and running the week we moved into the new building. I don’t think they envisaged the problem the IT department faced of migrating three different servers plus PCs and iMacs of various ages.
As any technical person will tell you, it can take a long time to integrate servers and transfer over vital information such as high resolution images, PDF files and emails. The other issue was staff members became understandably frustrated when they realised they couldn’t access work emails, the internet or some of their old files. Fortunately Microsoft Word was running so I could type stories otherwise I would have been sitting around talking to my workmates.
Perhaps the company was trying to save money by not investing in a new server but it would have saved a lot of headaches for staff and the IT department.
So tell your customers to be nice to their IT people (or person) when they ask for new resources - it could make all the difference to productivity and staff happiness.
