Sweet Child of Whine...

Trying new things can be exhausting. When I am forced to try them, I tend to whine instead of learn. The forceful change usually doesn't happen in our comfortable bubbles at home and our social life. The stretching and innovation is forced on us by work and, occasionally, our social media outlets (who didn't hate the "new" Facebook at first?) 

Or school. 

A new class begins online and the tried and true, Blackboard, is not being used. Instead, we must learn to use Sharepoint. My initial reaction was not positive. Like I said, I like to whine in these situations. I would put off logging on to the site because I was scared. I didn't (still completely don't) know how to use the site. And I got anxious navigating through it. Anxious I was going to do something so "techy" stupid that everyone in class would soon know I was lost. (It reminds me of when the new Facebook feature started the thread of ALL my photos on the top of my news feed and I freaked out that I had or was bound to upload some embarrassing photo). 

As I wrestled with the new format and my internal whining continued, I kept asking, "Why change what we already know?" It correlates with a saying I hear a lot at work, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

In fact, I started to realize at work,  this whining about change continues long into our lives..if we aren't careful. Over the last several months, corporate has shown up with their computer toting teams to introduce some new software program, and everyone whines for months. 

Sometimes this whining is justified. A new report has been added to a platform we use called ViewPoint. Another report amid the countless other reports that most of us never look at. But this report has been emailed about and discussed, and now tested. I tested the report. I am going to whine for a long time about this one! The problem is, they didn't ask for input from anyone who they thought would be using this report. And now it serves no purpose for those people. 

However, there are times the whining should really stop. Bank of America took over our company-wide credit card process. Now everything is scanned and done electronically, in real time, for the benefit of the company and the cardholders. But, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" has dictated how this process has been received. Now we have supervisors in the field losing receipts on purpose, we have slower submitting times than when we had paper copies once a month, and we have the endless whining. 

Listening to negative feedback when I can see the positive possibilities, is comparable to nails on a chalk board. And then it clicked. I need to try out this SharePoint. I need to share what I have felt and how I am learning to learn instead of whine. So this blog is born; to share the human side of information systems, to show how forgetting the people in the process can ruin change, and how shutting up once in a while and just learning about something new can be a good thing.