On Monday I presented my reasons why users hate IT.  The two sentence version is that I use really good web-based applications in my personal life, and it is frustrating to me that the applications I use at the office don’t work as well. I want to be able to use the tools that I think make me more productive and if they come from Google or Yahoo instead of my CIO, so be it.

To my great pleasure, the comments basically became a repository of all the arguments IT people make that users don’t get intuitively. It basically boiled down to security, corporate governance, interoperability, and the need for IT to support everyone in a company (which becomes exceedingly difficult if everyone is using whatever applications they want).

Well, I’m violating all of those needs, and today I’m going to tell you all about it. (By the way, if you work in CIO Magazine’s IT department please stop reading.)

Last week I configured my CIO email account to forward a copy of every new email to my Gmail account. I then configured my Gmail account so that emails addressed to my work address are automatically sent to one folder and emails addressed to my personal address go to another. I also set it up so that I can send emails from either address through the Gmail interface; whenever I compose a new message I just choose which me is sending it. I’ll get into the actual results of the experiment below, but first I want to explain why I did it.

I have two different identities, work-Ben and personal-Ben. But the line between the two is increasingly non-existent. I work at home and do personal stuff at the office. In fact, I’m constantly shuffling between work-Ben and personal-Ben. When I call up the VP of IT at a company, he agrees to talk to me because I write for CIO Magazine, and he probably doesn’t care that I drive a Volkswagen. Yet a minute later I’m on the phone with my mechanic, who has never heard of CIO Magazine but cares a great deal about my car. I’m using the same phone for both calls and choosing how I identify myself. (You could argue that I should use my cell phone for personal calls, but that’s overlooking two things: 1. I use my home phone for work calls all the time, and 2. it just takes too much time, which is scarce enough as it is.) I want my email to work the same way. I’m tired of having to use a different application for each of my identities. I want one application for Ben, and then I’ll choose whether I am using it as work-Ben or personal-Ben.

There is another question that I need to answer: Why not just use my work account for my personal emails? That way I wouldn’t be breaking any rules. Well, Gmail is just a much better email application than Lotus Notes, our in house application. Gmail is fast, searchable, has a ton of storage, displays emails with multiple responses in one line, the list goes on and on. These are all features that I want for my work email. In fact, I feel like I need them in order to be productive.

So is my plan working? It isn’t perfect. For starters I’m asking both Notes and Gmail to do things they weren’t designed to do (and quite possibly thing they were designed to prevent). In most cases the emails that I send as work-Ben through the Gmail interface have a little note on them that explains what I’ve done; Lotus Notes users who reply-all send messages to both my work and personal accounts; and sometimes the forwarded messages take a few minutes to show up. But otherwise it’s going as well as I could have hoped. The filters I set up work perfectly. I can actually find things using search, something I can’t do in Notes. And I no longer get angry every time I get an email from that one friend who always uses my work address. All and all, I don’t want to go back.

In my last post I suggested that users want to be able to use the applications that best meet their needs and that CIOs are just going to have to accept this. Here are a couple of responses. First, Anonymous (who seems to post a lot) wrote:

“What if you decided you want to use ABC Spreadsheets because it's really simple. Jeff in Accounting sends you an updated spreadsheet for expense reports, and your new program, although easy for you to understand, doesn't understand the MACROs embedded? You can see where I'm going with this. Corporate standards solve more issues than many people realize.”

RJB added:

“I don't approve when one department picks an application for a critical business function without consulting any other department including the IT group. Typically, they present it to me as a done deal - "just install this, please then leave us alone." I have to support three CAD packages because as engineers turned over, new staff wanted to make their own decisions. What you're suggesting is a step into an even deeper level of confusion and disorganization.”

These are both excellent points. The two examples don’t deal with applications that fit the work/personal life dichotomy I think is driving people to expect more from corporate applications – Excel, as best I can tell, is universally loved, and not many people go home at night and use a personal CAD system – but the concluding points about standards and confusion are pretty universal. My feeling that resolving the conflict between the need for control over information and the need to let employees have access to tools that will make them the most productive is going to be the next great challenge for IT departments. And the companies that figure out how to do this will not only have happier, more productive employees, but the IT department will be free to focus on forward thinking projects that could help drive revenue and innovation. It's worth noting that there are a handful of vendors out there that are betting the house on just this phenomenon. Rearden Commerce comes to mind, and my instinct is that this is also the key to Google’s enterprise strategy. 

In the meantime, I hope my flagrant flaunting of the rules has helped give some insight into what users want and think. And if you do work for CIO's IT department, I was only doing this for research purposes. I promise.

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