I follow some very smart people on Twitter. Sometimes they tweet and blog stuff that’s way over my head. Often I agree with them. Occasionally\u00a0I don’t.<\/p>\n
Last night, I spotted a tweet from Matt Ballantine (@ballantine70<\/a>)\u00a0that I felt compelled to rebel against. I’m late to the party (the tweet is nearly a week old – which is an age in the Twittersphere) but this is what Matt had to say, together with my response:<\/p>\n 20 years of locking down corporate PCs have left the workforce without the heuristic skills necessary to safely navigate the internet…<\/p>\n \u2014 Matt Ballantine (@ballantine70) February 23, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Not sure this is the case. Locking down PCs is futile but locking down browser access is less common. There’s a general lack of tech skills https:\/\/t.co\/fzDutvd1nQ<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit) February 28, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’ve long held the view that locking down PCs is missing the point. Even when BYOD was “a thing” (around 2010), I was writing that we needed to stop worrying about devices and operating systems and to start looking at data and applications. Now that’s becoming mainstream thinking – mobile device management (MDM) is finally being replaced with mobile application management (MAM) – and organisations are finally realising that laptops and “hybrid” devices are also mobile devices (it’s not just about tablets and phones).<\/p>\n The age of lockdown is also starting to wane.\u00a0Yes, organisations will still have corporate builds and still control what employees can do with the tech running on their networks but to get back to Matt’s statement – I simply\u00a0don’t buy that the lockdown is causing people to have an inability to navigate the Internet safely.<\/p>\n You see, I’ll suggest that the reason “the workforce [do not have] the heuristic skills necessary to safely navigate the Internet” is a general lack of digital skills.\u00a0We (in general) have not evolved our technical skills for the use of “office productivity” tools since the mid-1990s. When I was at Uni’, I used MS-DOS 6.0 and WordPerfect 5.1. By my final year, I had progressed to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and Word for Windows 2.0.\u00a0And the way most people use a word processor they might as well still be on that platform. In general, people don’t use the features and functionality in our bloated Office products. They just type words, put blank lines in for spacing, pick some fonts manually (ever heard of styles?) and save. \u00a0I could use similar examples for presentations in PowerPoint or for spreadsheets in Excel. The introduction of the ribbon in Microsoft Office circa 2007 was said to be an attempt\u00a0to surface the features people use the most (but features couldn’t be removed entirely because telemetry told Microsoft that everyone uses some of the features, just not all of us, all of the time).<\/p>\n At his Middle School (then aged around 9-11), my son was commended for his tech skills because he was able to offer classroom IT support to the teachers. That’s not because he’s a tech genius but because the staff at the school didn’t know how to use We teach our children to be safe on the Internet but many adults struggle too. “Would you like to see the dancing pigs?” Oh, go on then – click anything to make the box go away. Followed by “Oops, why is my browser opening all of these windows showing sites with pictures of scantily-clad ladies?”. This is not a new phenomenon either.<\/p>\n I’m in danger here of going off on a bit of a rant, so I’ll stop for a moment and focus on what many of us talk a lot about today – digital transformation – or rather how the digital skills gap is hindering our ability to transform.<\/p>\n Consultants like me work with organisations to help them adopt new technologies in order to address business issues, embrace change and, ideally, adapt their business to innovate – perhaps even disruptively. At least, that’s the idea – far too many organisations seem to want to “run an Office 365 project” rather than to “deliver a flexible workstyle facilitated by modern end-user computing services delivered using a software as a service model”. If they can’t see past the tech, it’s unlikely they will deliver true digital transformation.<\/p>\n Even if their business processes evolve,\u00a0do the staff have the skills to embrace the change? Do we have one generation (mine) still stuck in 1995, whilst the millennials want to do everything with apps on their phones (incidentally, I think a lot of the stuff written about millennials\u00a0is rubbish too – but that’s something for another post)? As Lewis Richards (@stroker<\/a>) notes below, being digital is a mindset.<\/p>\n 81-year-old woman makes iPhone app after only starting to use computers at 60 https:\/\/t.co\/wvKTPULFfD<\/a> being digital is a mindset #ln<\/a><\/p>\n — lewis richards (@stroker) February 28, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
\n
A general lack of digital skills<\/h3>\n
Windows+P<\/code> to connect to an external screen. To be fair to his teachers that’s not unique to them – it’s the same in most offices too. Similarly for booking calendar appointments for meetings (a black art to some) or not sending email attachments to share documents. The list goes on.<\/p>\nDigital transformation<\/h3>\n
\n