Author Diomidis Spinellis provides an audio recording of his Tools of the Trade column, in which he discusses how a scorecard can help evaluate and fix the environment you work in by covering the setup of your workstation and working environment, your ability to access remote hosts, general-purpose tools, editing, debugging, application development, and the specific problem at hand.
When you think of the home networking and technology setups at many homes today, it can certainly feel kind of like George and Jane Jetson’s home. At my house, between laptops, tablets, eReaders, smartphones, TVs, gaming consoles, and other connected equipment, I can have up to twenty devices running on my home network.
And while I don’t have the fastest broadband connection available, it’s still plenty fast enough to handle voice calls, real-time video chats and more than one TV watching online movies at a time. Also, the applications and software that I use at home on a daily basis provide high levels of functionality and usability.
Now compare this to an all too typical office environment, where users regularly complain about network performance and reliability. An office where if more than a few users try to watch a live video conferencing stream the network falls to its knees. And a workplace where users struggle with the software that they need to use to get their jobs done.
Really, it’s no surprise that so many choose to work at home rather than in the office. But it wasn’t always like this.
Back at the turn of the millennium, many workers would stay in the office after hours just to take advantage of the faster networks and more capable hardware. And consumer oriented software emulated business software and was often seen as less capable than home focused applications.
Well, those days are past and we now clearly live in a “better at home” world. And this makes the job of IT much tougher.
The expectations of your end-users are much higher today than they used to be. They know what good social networks look like and the corporate collaboration platform doesn’t match up. They know they can often get more done on their personal mobile devices than they can on the company provided laptop. And they know what a fast and reliable network is and the company network doesn’t qualify.
In this better at home world, it is more important than ever for organizations to understand network and application performance, not just from an operational standpoint, but also from the point of view of their end-users. In our research into network and application performance, we’ve found that the most successful organizations are those that understand user needs and expectations and build their infrastructures to not just meet, but exceed those expectations
