Yesterday at work, I stumbled upon some more of the fallout from controlling people. In the almost 30 years in the field of IT, I have seen varying levels of control, and how it's affected the businesses I've worked at. I have some theories as to why so many people are so controlling, so follow along and see if you agree, disagree, or just don't have an opinion.
So, early on I wasn't that aware of control freaks in IT, partly because I came from a manufacturing background where I worked on the factory floor, and just assumed some of what I was seeing was just that I wasn't quite knowledgeable yet, and my ideas were probably just that. Ideas. I assumed that my lack of experience might have been the reason for others not entertaining some of my ideas.
What I've seen over the years is that many say no to new ideas because they either don't understand the new technology, or they are afraid of losing that control over things, and will no longer be the "go to" person for problems of new ideas. The second job in IT that I had, my Team Lead was a really nice guy, but he had built his own little fiefdom. He was an expert in the limited area he oversaw, and everyone was pretty happy with his work. There were a lot of things that could've been less manually laborious, but he would always tell the end users that he was just too busy to do much about it. Understand that this was green screen era, and nobody was willing to learn or utilize new technology there.
Instantly I saw some ways to help improve things. I made it a point to sit with each of the end users for a few hours out of the day to observe their daily routines. Nobody had heard of that before, and they wondered what my purpose was in doing so. From watching one person grab her daily report with over 150 pages, and she just took out 5 sheets and threw the rest in recycling, to the other who would manually enter accounts payable information in to a spreadsheet from a report, to assist with reconciliation. What I did was started to put together notes, and found a way to get that report down to those 5 pages that the end user needed, saving over 100 sheets of paper per day just on that report alone. What it ended up doing was also shortening our nightly batch window by over 1 hour, and shortened up our report printing window by 15 minutes. The person who was doing the manual entry of AP info into a spreadsheet, I wrote an application that would parse the report output that was sent to a file, and then pushed that data in to a spreadsheet. That save the end user about 12 hours per month of manually entering data, and removed the human error piece of it all. Interestingly, my Team Lead questioned it all as to whether or not things were accurate, and tried to find reasons it couldn't be a permanent solution. 8 years later, these 2 things were still being utilized before they changed their purchasing and accounting software.
There were so many more examples like this, but what I found interesting, was the lengths the Team Lead would go trying to quash my ideas. Later on I realized, it was because they were afraid that all of what I was doing would make them more vulnerable in the event of cost cutting/downsizing. And I've notice this same trend happen at the jobs I've had since then. Each place, there were individuals who would try to impede progress, and keep things status quo. I'm just glad that now I don't let it eat my lunch like I used to. I do what I can, and if I run up against the wall of controlism (my phrase), I just don't push it anymore. I realized that the stress of battling those trying to hold on to control was just no longer worth it, and that if I can't change them, then I'll just implement these new ideas and technologies where I can.
