More on the Technology mindset

I have been asking this question to see how it is affecting business operations. In the first few interviews, I was looking at people who are uncomfortable with technology, although I saw problems with people who were comfortable with some aspects of technology and tended to overuse the same tool.

Today I spoke to an entrepreneur who was comfortable with technology, but but was frustrated with the time it took to learn new tools. His problem was not the learning process, he enjoyed it. His problem was that during the learning process, he was unproductive. It took far too long to get the job done and when he needed information about his business, his files weren't up-to-date. That means it was affecting his business. His frustration and the time required was bothering him and causing him to delay working with the software.

This brings up a point that happens in every business. When you implement new software, you lose productivity. Much of what we do everyday, we do by remote control. We don't think about it, because it has become routine. This is good, because we are much more productive and effective (try thinking about walking and see how difficult it is).

When we implement new software, we can't do it subconsciously, we have to think about it. We are also often overwhelmed by the sheer functionality of the software. We bought it because it had a lot more functionality than we had before (if not, why did we buy it?). The result is that we become less productive. If we focus on the whole software product (if that's possible), we resist dealing with it (That's why many software projects fail to meet their goal, people revert to the old way).

The solution is to focus. Find those items that are a priority. Spend your time on them and get up-to-speed quickly. Then focus on your next priority. As you do this, you will learn to do these things automatically, your frustrations will go down, and you will become productive much more quickly.

Unfortunately, software suppliers don't help you. Their interest is to "train you". This means turning on the firehose of training. This isn't the way you learn and it doesn't help your business. Focus on your business processes and the software functions that achieve your objectives. If you want more detail, check out my white papers for more information.

If you want to know what happened to my friend an his mindset, we identified three transactions that he needed to focus on. He is going back to get help on those specific transactions, and now recognizes that they will only take a few minutes to handle as part of an assignment. He has scheduled learning periods for himseff to bring him up to speed on the software. This won't impact his business performance, since it isn't being done at critical times. He enjoys the learning and can focus on this during his learning sessions.