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Paul was talking about young people coming out of school into business wanting to use Google’s office suite or whatever they used at school and IT pros keep telling him that they have the say on what is used.
That isn’t quite true and it also shows up one of the problems with the education system today.
When I was at school, we had a diverse range of software, probably half a dozen spreadsheets, over a dozen word processors, for example. We weren’t taught how to use 1-2-3 or WordPerfect, we were taught the fundamentals of how a spreadsheet worked, how a word processor worked, what tabs were etc. I’d switch between ProWrite at college, ProText and Wordsworth at home, WordPerfect at one employer and DisplayWrite at another, because I knew how a word processor worked, I didn’t learn how Microsoft Word worked, that former was overlayed on the latter and you worked out how the tool in question actually implemented your understanding of how the job got done.
Today, pupils and students usually get taught one product, not how the product works, not how the fundamentals of spreadsheets or word processors work, but specifically which buttons in this specific tool to press, without first learning why. I think that is a big mistake, without the fundamentals of why you would want to do something, you can’t really understand what you are actually doing, not at a level that is easily transferable.
The other point I’ve regularly made to Paul is, if you are coming up out of school and say, “I want to use Google Sheets,” the employer is going to smile ingratiatingly at you and plonk you in front of Excel or LibreOffice, Zoho Office or whatever happens to be the corporate standard. They aren’t going to redefine their workflows, convert millions of documents and re-train thousands of employees, just because some new hire wants something different.
If it is a small mom and pop business or a startup with relatively few employess, yes, that person may have more of a sway, especially if they can show that it brings an improvement to the way the business is already being run.
But a business with decades worth of knowledge and documents, it is, unfortunately unrealistic - and it isn’t the IT pros driving those decisions, it is the business itself, their suppliers and their customers. There just isn’t the space for one person coming into the business to turn around that inertia.
For example, the Office suite might be important to students in school, journalists as well, to a certain extent, but in a big business, the Office suite is an immaterial add-on to the corporate software, it has to mold itself to how the “real” software works.
The ERP system, and possibly the accounting software, if it isn’t part of the ERP, is often the core of many big businesses, so everything has to work with that. The ERP system defines what Office suite is compatible, it defines what CRM software you can use, it defines what tablet software you can use etc.
We have an ERP system that generates reports directly in Excel and Word, not M365 web versions, not LibreOffice, not Google’s Suite, not Zoho Office, specifically Excel and Word, no other choices available, you either use MS Office full-fat clients or you don’t get any reporting.
Our CRM software is tied closely into the ERP system and is the only CRM software that is compatible with the ERP system. The CRM software only supports Word and Outlook, full-fat clients. The telephone system only supports Outlook for contact management - you can use others, even web based contact management, to dial out, but you don’t get the business card of the caller displayed, when receiving a call.
These software systems, ERP, CRM and accounting, define the business and they also define what other software the business can use, not what they want to use, what will work and what won’t. Businesses just aren’t going to throw out multi-million dollar investments in their production systems, because a student comes in demanding Google Suite or whatever.
For a software house or a small business, which isn’t reliant on these business process defining tools, or a new business just getting off the ground, this might be different, but in big industry, you just don’t have a say - even an IT pro, like me, I get to use the software the company decides it needs, I might be able to give some input about using the latest, most patched versions, or software for certain specific tasks, but at the end of the day, the decision is taken over my head.
The absolute worst is PLC software, often you can’t even run that on the latest version of Windows, you can’t even patch Windows with security updates, because it might break the PLC, if the patches haven’t been approved, which is generally a new patch stand every 18 months or so. This is why all our PLC control PCs are on segregated networks, with no access to the company network, let alone the Internet.
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When I was in college, I interned with the school IS department. One year, we had a new professor who made arrangements with a CAD software company to provide licensing free of charge for the students to use, with the goal being that the students would want to use their software when they got to the workplace. That was the only year we had that software, though we did need to find a way to run it for seniors who had learned it and needed it for their projects.
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I did a similar deal with IBM for their Rational suite, when I was doing a programming seminar at a university, here in Germany. But we switched to Eclipse with UML plug-ins after a few months.