It’s time professionals were IT-literate

If you hired an accountant who couldn’t count or a lawyer who couldn’t read or write, you’d want your money back.  Reading, writing and ‘rithmetic have long been core business competencies.  It’s time to consider what competency means in a techno world.

We were recently involved in a case where eight or ten highly paid lawyers needed access to a common set of documents.  It soon became apparent that any solution that demanded even modest computer skills would not fly.  Apparently efficiency and $750 per hour price tags are incompatible.

It set us to wondering about what constitutes core skills these days.  Here are some of the things we count as basic in the late two-thousand-and-nothings, courtesy of my weekly Hands On column.  Not everybody in the IT industry would pass our tests, either.

Can you do an unformatted copy & paste ?

First is the ability to copy and paste information between documents – - usefully.  Everybody seems to know that you can copy from a document or web page and paste into MS Word.  But if the process drags along a swag of eccentric formatting codes you end up with a document that looks like it was produced in a food processor, not a word processor.

Transferring information from one digital context to another depends on being able to feed it in seamlessly.  For Word, that means a special function called unformatted paste.  Find it under the Edit, Special menu.  It drops text into the document without any formatting baggage.

What about sensible file names ?

Second is the skill to name files meaningfully.  Why does it matter ?  Before Windows 95, file names were limited to eight characters, and we carped that names like letrtokr made no sense.   Now file names can run to dozens of characters and we still receive email attachments called pdfscanletr08, and worse.  Before a file is opened, its name is all we know about it.  Would it be so hard for the sender to title it helpfully ?

Is your email up to scratch ?

Third is skill and sensitivity with email.  Few people email unto others only as they would have others email unto them.  If we receive just one more message that multiply re-quotes the entire preceding conversation several times over, including lengthy copyright and privilege notices. we’ll scream.  Simply forwarding a confused, rambling email to five other people isn’t management or communication or whatever else so many business operators perceive it to be.

What about FTP ?

Next is the ability to use FTP, the ancient internet system that makes file transfers a snap.  Long before the WWW was fashionable the so-called file transfer protocol ruled the Net.  Type www.microsoft.com into a browser and you’ll arrive in MS heaven.  Type ftp.microsoft.com and you’ll find a plain old folder-based world that looks pretty much like something on your hard drive.

That’s the point.  FTP enables access to a remote library of documents that appear as if they were on the local system.  Access times may be slower thanks to internet speed limits but where a dispersed team needs to share a common set of files, the convenience of FTP outweighs the latency factor.

Or a crafty Google search ?

Next comes a skilful Google search.  Like it or not, Google is a business standard in 2008.  It’s often faster to search a local café on the international search engine than via the conventional phone directory.  Knowing how to limit search results to exact phrases, or Australian results only, or Excel spreadsheets that contain a particular word can yield rich information harvests.

Can you keep a secret ?

After that, add the ability to deliver information in confidence.  Only a handful of business folk can send a message or document confidentially.  If we know how to password, and that’s rare, we seldom know how to deliver the password without compromise.  If an emailed document is important enough to password protect, it’s important enough to phone or SMS the password through.  For millennia, spies have avoided sending passwords through the same channel as the secret message.

Do businesses really want IT-literate staff ?

We could fill pages detailing the skills business needs to make good use of today’s technology.  More important than the detail or order of our wish list is whether management is prepared to identify needs and train the enterprise systematically.

We are past the point where it’s good enough to ask Harry’s help when a clever Google search is needed, because he’s really good at it.  Or hope Bev is at work today, because she knows how that MS Word passwording thing works.  We need to identify the new 3Rs and teach them as the key skills they are.