Anonymous

South East

Consultant

Do these people REALLY have "IT Skills" or are they simply "comfortable using IT"? I strongly suspect that it is the latter.
Even so, that comfort creates an opportunity to use IT for greater productivity. But how many companies have you come across who are trying, for example, to stem the tide of e-mail by better use of forums or wiki - and putting in the training and change management effort to make this work? Near zero I suspect - for one of the reasons mentioned in the article.
Whilst younger people (and some older ones too!) would be quite comfortable working this way if encouraged, their hierarchical "betters" are not - and lack the insight or courage to find out themselves.
There is a falacious assumption that because IT has "intuitive" (big laugh!) interfaces little or no training is needed to use it to work smarter. Not so - a badly written piece of text is badly written whether it is done with a quill or a state of the art PC. A chain of postings to a forum or wiki where nobody has bothered to think about the heading of their entry so that all are the same is a waste of electrons and time, forcing one to read every entry to make any sense of it. I could go on........