Why do we exist
I thought about ‘Why do we exist?’ – I had a sudden realisation that readers would be thinking ‘Wow’, could he be relating this to life, god and the universe.
Well let me put your minds at rest – I wasn’t. I was thinking about ‘Why do we exist? from a technology, service support & delivery point of view.
The actual meaning of life has always been an easy one to answer and for those of you, like me, who grew up with only radio and TV know the answer was uncovered for us by a guy who travelled around the universe and only wore a pair of pyjamas and a nightgown. The answer is 42.
[For those of you who are fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – yes I know following this revelation the search was on for ultimate question]
So back to Why do we exist, well lets look at it from another prospective. Our customers, consumers of our service offerings, the general public and family and friends are much more IT Savvy then they ever were. The millennial generation (also known as Generation Y these are the group of people born from around 1980-ish to 1995-ish) have account for much of that.
Technology and IT is everywhere, the digital divide has got smaller and is not only obvious at work but also in our personal lives. Just pause for a moment and have a look at what you are carrying with you? A mobile phone, a blackberry, a laptop, a netbook, a PSP – we have stopped carrying around journals, diaries and paper note books – but use a combination of technologies and a handful of USB drives.
Looking over our lives we have moved on from depending on the support of administration assistants and have all become self-sufficient. When was the last time you asked someone to draft a letter or give you a briefing of what was happening in the world?
It appears the dependance on technology is amazing, particularly if we decided to do nothing – What I mean is if we – the technology, service support & delivery specialists were to stop. To turn off and remove all the services we provide?
You may need a moment to think about the impact of this?
What would we use to keep in touch with friends and colleagues? As youngster we just managed, but living without technology would be unthinkable.
You’re probably wrestling with what you’d substitute your technology with? I realised that it may not be the technology itself but how the technology gives you a better quality of life and makes most things easier and much more accessible.
At work, what would it cost if we did nothing? again if we decided to stop, turn off and remove all the technology services we provided?
The cost would be huge, you’d probably lose your competitive edge, products would fail to go to market on time and the overhead of administration would be unbearable.
There would be a huge loss in productivity, it would take longer and involve much more administration & processing to get where you wanted to be.
Therefore, it would lead that we are directly responsible for the productivity of our business.
I’ve always thought that was quite a powerful sentence, I mention this not to impress you – but to impress upon you how important that it is – we are involved, not only when things go wrong but also from the beginning.
By working with those who form the strategy for the services our businesses consume; Ensuring we consider services we design not only cover the normal business-as-usual operation, but also extreme conditions; The transition of services into operation are controlled & successful and finally we have the appropriate resource to monitor, maintain and support services in operations.
So when I ask myself or am asked by others – Why do you exist? I fast-forward through the above, bite my lip when I get to 42 and realise that we are directly responsible for the productivity for those we support, but am mindful that we exist for our organisations to be successful and not for technology – itself.
Photo credit: Tony Fischer Photography / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)