Today while learning about GSSs the comment was made that one of the benefits is that they allow anonymous contributions. To quote from our text, Information Systems Management in Practice:

Furthermore, the anonymity allowed by the GSS would reduce some participants' concerns about negative repercussions if they contributed unpopular, critical, or new ideas. (McNurlin pg 407).

I completely disagree that contributions to group systems within a company should be anonymous. Companies should be hiring people who are not afraid to speak their minds. And if because of company cultural considerations people feel afraid to contribute then the company culture needs to be re-worked. Technology should not be used to compensate for poor employees and neither should it be used to make up for a threatening work environment.

Also, if contributions are tied to employees you can begin to electronically track both contributions and their results on the company's performance. The result is that employees who are good contributors can be rewarded and promoted while under performing employees can be brought up to speed or let go.

My other recent disagreement is with Executive Support Systems. We often hear and read about how high level executives dislike or do not know how to use computers and so everything has to be dumbed down for them. While I can understand that today there may be some executives who are clueless about technology, tomorrow that will not be the case. I do not care if you are the CEO of a cookie company or a Tic-Tac company, you are going to have to understand the ramifications of technology and be able to use it every day; executives will need a laptop. I would not invest in any company where they CEO did not have a computer and know how to use it. That said, I also wouldn't hire a professional such as a lawyer, accountant, or architect who was ignorant of the day-to-day benefits of technology.

Now having said that.. In one of my interviews I was asked to discuss where technology would be ten years from now. One of the things I mistakenly said was that I believed that ten years from now users would be smarter and therefore we could have more sophisticated sytems. The counter example my interviewer gave me was cars. One hundred years ago people who drove cars had to know a lot about the technology used in cars. Compare that with today, how much do we need to know about cars in order to drive them? Answer, not much. So, as time moves forward user knowledge of the technology should decrease as the interface improves.

I agree with that. But I do not agree that this should be applied to CEOs. Yes, they can for a large part delegate the responsibility for technology to other executives, but to be ignorant of some of the most basic applications of computer technology, such as email, the web and Microsoft Word, will mean them being ignorant about the greater implications of technology for their business no matter what their industry. And that places their company at a grave disadvantage.

Of course it is ignorance that allows upstart companies to trample existing leaders and as someone who wants to build one of those upstarts I can only hope for increased ignorance.
7:45:47 PM   []

Anyhow, my Dad told me the story of the rink he tried to build for us kids in our front yard. The problem he ran into when building the rink was that our front yard turned out to not be level. So to flood it required a foot of ice on one side while the other would still have no ice. Of course we lived in the country and had our water shipped in so he was paying our water hauler $20 a load and getting nowhere.

One or two years our neighbors built a rink and I remember both having a good time and losing lots of pucks. In later years one of our newer neighbors would also build killer rinks. He had a pond out back that he pumped water out of to flood the empty lot besides him. Of course he used a real big pump with real big hoses and did not run into the same problem John and I did with the pipes freezing. He even went so far as to rig up big lights on telephone/hydro poles (he worked for Hydro) and a sound system.

Another good outdoor skating experience was the one or two years that the Seine river froze before any snow fell. You could skate forever on perfect pristine ice in not too cold weather. It was ideal.

Several times when we went to the lake during the winter we'd sholve off a area of the bay and the conditions were usually pretty good. Once I'm gainfully employed I'll buy a snow blower for the cottage to speed up the process.

And of course, you can't beat skating around downtown Winnipeg when 'the Forks' floods the Red River and has little warming huts along the way. The last few Christmases the conditions weren't right so I haven't been skating there in a while. Maybe this year?
3:29:31 PM   []