Terrific MentorsJohn Bittleston, Eliza Quek & Denise Pang – Career, Business and Personal Mentors

Change The Procedures To Make Use Of The IT

08 Jun 2008

Topics: information technology

A man doesn’t dig his garden just because he has a new shovel. Cultivation is for survival or entertainment, not simply to make use of the new toy on the block. And yet how many of us have fallen for the IT hardware and then searched, often unsuccessfully, for its purpose?

Don’t get me wrong about this, I’m an IT buff as well and I enjoy exploring the latest gadgets and software advances. It’s a lifetime’s work. But when it comes to business I try to be a little more hard-nosed about the tools I am going to use.
When I was building Cerebos Pacific I asked my senior managers to let me know, if they could only have one hundred figures of reporting a month, which would they be?

Of the six MD’s who reported to me, five came up with almost identical lists. The sixth ran a totally different sort of business and his priorities reflected the nature of it.

I didn’t force any of them to limit their monthly ration to one hundred figures but I noticed that, after the exercise, all of them, without exception, vastly reduced the amount of information going across their desks. Why?

They had grown up with the correct idea that data is power. They had assumed that all data is therefore useful. But it isn’t. Some data is vital, some useless and some positively misleading. Knowing which is which today distinguishes a good manager from a bad one.

The amount of information flowing to us is growing exponentially. What we now know is probably about one percent of what we will know by 2050. A hundredfold increase in our knowledge will need very special handling if it is not to overwhelm us completely.

How shall we handle it?

First, we must make the software work harder for us. To achieve that we must ourselves be more specific about what we really need to know. Take the simple example of ‘budgets’ and ‘actuals’. The one bit of information we do not need is to know that they are the same. We do need to know when they vary by a significant amount, and why. Default reporting of data has been around for a long time. Why don’t we use it? It can save vast amounts of time.

In the process of defining what we need to know we must also avoid the trap that everything can be reduced to numbers. It can’t. There is a qualitative side to business and work that cannot be measured very accurately. So how do we assess this tricky, undefined quality?

By giving ourselves as managers enough time to observe, listen and learn the finer points of human relations and motivation. IT is there to sound the alarm bells, to point us to what needs attention. It is not there to make our decisions for us. For the time being, at any rate, the human brain can process more – and more complex – data than even the best of computer software.

That time will not last much longer. The pace of knowledge change, of data processing speed and of communication facility is so fast that we need to prepare now to be able to handle the data flood that is soon to break.

A list of the information you couldn’t live without is a good way to start that process. It will also help you to sort your records, find simpler ways to manage the essential information and give you time to do the real job of life – managing and helping others.