I Wonder!

I'm a network administrator for a 250 user network. It's just me and my boss. The company that I work for just re-purchased our the stock back from our now former parent company. Now IT has a lot more responsibilities and we are now in a race to have Internet and email moved back to the office here and Greenville and to be off of the parent company network by January 1, 2004.

Now we are proposing and designing and hoping and wishing for some technology upgrades!

Ok here is where I am at with all of this. We proposed about $250K worth of upgrades to our management who seemed to take it in stride. We proposed based on our ideas of what the company needs. We based our ideas on the fact that we are always in dire need of disk space, the servers are all taxed to a point that they noticeably are affecting performance of the users, and the needs of hardware and software to move us to providing our own email and internet services. That's it.

I'm thinking "There's something missing! We need to also consider what new technology would provide the company! We need to understand how we could use any new technology to make the business better!" RIGHT - of course, I thought the same way didn't I when I was a consultant! You want to propose something that will make a positive difference even something earthshattering if possible! Right! - Right!

Now how to understand that - how do I understand this for myself so that I can turn around and make the company understand that. Isn't that really the crux of problem - or is it? Understanding what it is that we need to understand? I need to be able to first identify needs of the user's of the system and needs of the company overall, then identify the technology that will meet those needs. I also need to understand the unidentified needs - needs that are not easily recognized. Needs that someone somewhere has identified and developed technology that really makes a difference!

Isn't life like that in some ways? We sort of know that we need to know something but it is first hard to understand. We go along the way in life and sometimes don't know that there is something that we could think, or learn that may make our lives much, much better, but sometimes we don't even try to identify such things. We aren't being innovative in our work and we aren't innovative in our own lives. I think that this may be a shame!

Don't we want to make things better? Don't we want to move forward? Ok we don't always but isn't the goal of a business or a man to move forward, to find and learn better ideas and thoughts? To find better ways to live and exist? How is it that it is easy to forget that we should want to do our best to grow!

I wonder!