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 PC Magazine, Oct 6,
1998 v17 n17 p85(1) The Untrained Executive. (Industry Trend or Event)(Column)Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1998 ZDNet Today I saw the most amazing thing. A guy my age (yes, that old!) with a very new-looking Toshiba Tecra 740, diagonally across the aisle from me on a United flight. Laptop computers on airplanes have become such a commonplace that they're no more worthy of notice than the in-flight magazines, but this fellow caught my attention because I kept hearing the unmistakable sound of a Windows 98 boot sequence. I surreptitiously--dare I admit it?--watched him work for a while. He had a senior-executive aura about him; definitely not one of the downtrodden wage slaves. He was in Microsoft Word, writing a complaint letter about the flight we were on, about how two women had gotten upgraded to first class and he hadn't, how some defect in the armrest of the seat in front of him was threatening his knee and the flight attendant ignored his request for a piece of tape to place over it, and who knows what else. The letter wasn't the amazing thing; I was astounded by his utter lack of competence with the machine in his lap and its installed software. He obviously used it a lot, because his My Documents folder was filled with documents with titles of the "This is the first sentence of my letter.doc" variety. His typing wasn't half bad, and he used at least some of Word's features, but every time he did an intermediate save on his file, he hit Ctrl-Alt-Del or found some other way to bring up the Close Program dialog box. Once he did this, he would inevitably (as far as I could tell) hit the Shut Down button and reboot the machine. He would restart Word by clicking on his file in the My Documents view, and by some luck, the saved file or a recovered file would be there. During one of the many boot sequences, he managed to click on some Norton Utilities wizard that launched a lengthy sequence of processes that displayed file menus and a seemingly interminable series of progress bars. He sat patiently through the entire, 10-minute performance, then launched his letter again and resumed his litany of complaints. Maybe it was a good way for him to fill his flight time, but I thought about him and all the other clueless users he was a proxy for. This guy didn't even know enough to be angry at all the goofy things that were going by on his screen, but just accepted them placidly. I had half a mind to write a letter on his behalf to the IT manager in his organization, to find out how this road warrior could be so poorly equipped for battle. If this guy had spent as much time in training as he did waiting for his machine to reboot, he could have written half a dozen complaint letters. Still, executive egos can be frail things, and the idea of taking a competency exam before being turned loose with one's laptop wouldn't fly in many organizations. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea, however, just a hard one to implement. Our own CIO, Steve Gladyszewski, sums up the problem of executive computer illiteracy succinctly: "I've given up." In 20 years of IT experience, he says, he has yet to find the magic incentive that would get execs to spend a couple of hours in training that would pay them (and the company) back handsomely in the coming weeks and months. "In our own company," he admits, "we have senior managers who don't use their machines effectively. We could show them ways to get their time back a hundredfold." He tells of seeing managers "task switch" by closing one program before starting another, and countless other horror stories. "When they ask, we do everything we can to help them," he says. "But a tiny amount of training would make their lives and our help desk lives immeasurably easier." Gladyszewski says the problem is just as prevalent in high-tech firms like ours as in low-tech firms. As we landed, I tried to think of a way to ask my clueless cabinmate, in effect, why his computer rebooted so often (not suggesting that he was at fault, of course), but I quickly lost him in the landing rush as he bolted for the door. Chances are excellent that he won't be reading this column, and he wouldn't have much to say about it anyway. But if you've got a solution to the executive-training conundrum, drop me a line at bill_machrone@zd.com. Clueless Please help me find the magic incentive to get execs to spend
a couple of hours in training.
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