There's a difference between the technology that people use at home and in the office: the stuff they use at home is better. And the gap is becoming so wide, it's embarrassing.
Today, many home users have fast PCs with 2GHz or better Pentium 4 chips running Windows XP, and possibly Microsoft Office XP. A small but rapidly growing number have broadband internet connections and Wi-Fi wireless networks. Their printers produce images that look like colour photographs. Millions have digital cameras and multimedia mobile phones.
What do they have in the office? Most likely 450MHz or 600MHz Pentium II or III machines running Windows 98SE or worse. They are still using Office 97, which is an antique. They may have a broadband connection, but it's shared by so many people that it's slower than dial-up. They probably have access to a decent networked laser printer, but it's mono only, and that's about it.
It is not the first time we have had a mismatch between home and business uses of technology. After personal computing arrived in the 1970s, more than a few IT departments spent the best part of a decade in denial, clinging to minis or mainframes with dumb terminals. People who had good economic grounds for buying a PC had to use creative accounting to bring them in by the back door. (At least when notebook PCs, Palm handhelds and smart phones appeared, they were small enough to smuggle in through the front door.)
The millennium bug is partly to blame. Companies worried about their systems failing at the turn of the century bought new PCs,in 1999 rather than waste money auditing and fixing the old ones. But the dotcom disaster and the general financial downturn have since slowed the replacement cycle, so some are still using PCs that should have been pensioned off.
But a natural leaning towards the "command and control" approach is also implicated. I've yet to meet an IT department that didn't argue for standardisation as a way of reducing support costs, even if they'd standardised on an unreliable operating system (Windows 98) instead of a reliable one (Windows 2000). But the result is like a second world war convoy, with everyone condemned to sail at the speed of the slowest ship.
This is bad for everyone. First, it means companies are often failing to benefit from new technologies, which really are easier to use, more reliable, and much more versatile than the products that dominated the last century. Second, it means individuals are not being given the chance to exploit existing skills, or to develop new ones. Third, it means that separate divisions, departments, workgroups and individual users will find their own solutions, which are unlikely to follow whatever passes for company policy.
When computing was new and very expensive, maybe a restrictive attitude made sense. But now there are people entering the workforce who have been using PCs all their lives, and the technology is cheap enough for them to use at home. It's time to start putting it to work.
