We're Doing What Now?

Human Error.  It factors into everything business. Every single thing hinges off an corporations ability to put people at the top of its list of priorities. There is a nice little article on www.securityintelligence.com that discusses how attackers play on our human weakness, and over 95% of successful attacks are caused by human error.  Humans mess up everything. By this, I mean, we need to factor human error into every aspect of a business. In the heavy highway construction industry, safety is a huge human error threat. I recently sat through a presentation on this very aspect of safety. The speaker stressed over and over that you cannot legislate human error out of processes. You can't make up enough rules, enough check lists, enough audits, etc. People are going to screw up.  The key to eliminating the chance of human error, is to figure out WHY. He told us about an electrical company that saw a huge increase in worker injury, so they called in a cons...

My teammate and I met up last week and had a great discussion. A few topics came up from my blog and I was really impressed with how differently my teammate views things. It was good to get an out-of-the-box perspective. Mostly we discussed my work and how I see MIS integrate with our human emotions. I shared a story of my own: I get so frustrated every Tuesday. It is the designated day for Construction Scorecard Reports, a report I am completely convinced no one pays attention to. I feel this way because during the winter months I am not required to do them (there is no work to "score"), and this year I just never started the report back up in April. So, the second week of June the guilt gets the better of me and I crank out 6 weeks of the report and post it to the bulletin board. I was venting this frustration to my teammate. We came to the conclusion that I need to ask someone to explain the value of what I am doing with these reports. I spend time doing them, taking a...

So, I was wrong. I sat down and interviewed the President and Vice-President of The Shelly Company Northwest Division, and I left the interview changed. I had this very limited view on what it meant to be in the field with these guys. Here is the bottom line: You don't know what you don't know. Our industry is a landscape of technology extremes. On the archaic end, we have guys wielding shovels and rakes, smoothing out asphalt by hand. But, on the other end, the machine that just laid that asphalt is the latest GPS, geothermal, nuclear-powered technology you can find. My conversation with the executives of the company was extremely enlightening. The Vice President asked me what I knew about laying asphalt...my response sounded something like this,  "uhhhhh..." He proceeded to tell me this. "You don't know what you don't know. You will never understand what it means to actually get out with a stake to measure asphalt along the road. Just like my ...

Yesterday the president of my company rushed into my boss' office. I overheard a conversation that has led me to reach out to the president about a possible interview for my blog and research. He said, "Thank you for coming in there and doing that for me, I really need people who use this system to talk about what has value--real value to our business." They are discussing a platform we used called Quickbase Pipeline. We use it as a collaborative space to track upcoming bids, awarded projects and scheduling. There is so much information within this program about the materials and projections and future goals, etc. but none of us really understand how to use that aspect. My boss narrowed down his thoughts about why this program is so difficult. He said, "It doesn't think like we do, it's an "if, then, and" program that you have to think backward about the information you want. You have to input what you don't need to get some of what you do. ...

"Do you remember where that auto out-of-office set up is?" I hear from the office next to mine. I know he is talking to me, he is always talking to me when it comes to his computer. "Yes, you just click File..." I respond, as I round the corner into his office. He is grumbling on and clicking way too many times to be where I was beginning to direct him. "No, back up, get out of that menu, right there, just one click and it is on the right-hand side", I scroll through and show him the options. "It's just too damn easy anymore..." he grumbles again. I walked out of his office thinking about that statement. I just finished reading about Technology Bias as told by Gideon Rosenblatt on the site The Vital Edge. In this article, Rosenblatt talks about how bias structures the networks around us, essentially creating a bubble around us, as he calls it, an "echo chamber of shared bias." What? Ok, so let's take a look at one of th...