... certainly not my subversive kind of porn.
At work, I use Atlassian's Jira to help a large organization track and manage very complicated, distributed projects. Jira is a web-based issue management tool. Prior to my work, employees had emailed each other massive spreadsheets where the recipient would have to collate it with other spreadsheets. Usually, the spreadsheets were OBE as soon as they were received as the data behind them was constantly changing.
M$FT Office was the best tool we Boomers had to do information work. Nowadays, web-based tools where the servers exchange information with each other in near real-time is far superior.
Our organization is only now crawling away from M$FT Office. Oh, wait, it's being dragged back into it. Marginally competent managers on our IT and Knowledge Management teams have been sold a bill of goods with Office 365 and M$FT Teams, so web-based tools are being phased out in favor of files and email.
We Boomers are reaching out from our career graves and tormenting the younger generations, haunting them with Excel and PowerPoint. It's a horror movie in tech.
Anyways, I asked ChatGPT, M$FT's AI tool to generate an image of this and ... well, see for yourself.
4 comments:
To be fair to ChatGPT here, I'm not sure how I would draw that, either.
The main issue with going to the new web-based tools, is that it's just being thrown at me with no indication of how it is supposed to work. Most people I work with want to use Google Docs, and the way that it handles the filesystem is a mess. I am only now getting to the point where I can find the same damned document twice running, and I don't know how to organize it so that I can know where things are instead of doing a keyword search for them every time. Not to mention the time that one of my students created a fairly important spreadsheet that everyone else was using, but retained ownership of it. And then when they graduated and left, IT turned off the account and the spreadsheet just kind of vanished, and IT couldn't get it back. Luckily we had a lot of it backed up, and the original data was on paper so we could reconstitute it.
Just last week, I gave one of my students comments on her dissertation that I had written by hand on a printed copy. And she told me that it is actually easier for her to work with than when people try to give feedback by electronically marking up her document. I'm sure the web tools have tremendous advantages for large groups working on complex problems, and who all know how to use the tools. But for small groups of two to four people, working on technical papers and basic spreadsheets, I think they are often more trouble than they are worth.
(Of course, I still mostly use a blackboard to lecture. I am no fan of Powerpoint, and from what my students tell me, they aren't keen on Powerpoint either. And whatever the hell Microsoft is trying to do with Office 365 and Teams is a monstrosity).
A really good Knowledge Management team would roll out a suite of web tools combined with a good search engine. The idea is to mimic the Internet, but keep it behind the corporate firewalls. A wiki, a blogging platform, a social networking app, Jira for project management, a software versioning and repository app and a video hosting system would provide the organization with all they needed.
Finding files would be done with search, not with "buried bones" as a friend of mine used to call it. That's where you either store files on your hard drive or save links to them on your browser.
All of this would be teamed up with training videos and a marketing campaign.
We did all of that, the suite of tools exploded in popularity and then my contemporary Boomers, most of whom were suspicious of our newfangled gimcracks and gewgaws, were willingly seduced by M$FT and they all fell back into SharePoint, Office and Teams.
We're back to not being able to find and collaborate with people we don't know already.
We use MSTeams for IM and meetings. But have had some false starts trying to use it for file organization. It's just not good at it.
I think my former company used Jira, or migrated to Jira. There was something Jira. But we use Rally for project management. And a consulting company getting us to do PI planning 'right'. And they don't like Rally. We used to work all in tasks, but they hate tasks and want us to use swimlanes. Because a random box moving from left to right is progress.
And we have a huge wiki of documentation, properly managed. I.e. a tech writer puts stuff in it and keeps it organized, and nobs like me can't mess it up.
Office mostly gets in my way, I'm not very good at using the tools. I am a minor league spreadsheet user. I had a great one that I used for managing Boy Scout fund raising wreath sales and the 20 kids selling 20 different items. It could total up what needed to be ordered and how much money needed to be collected, paid to the supplier, and profit for each Scout. When it was given to me, it did about 1/4 of that.
I don't understand why people would pay monthly to use M$office. There are so many places to get a lifetime license for a version. Stack Social will get you a license key for $30 or. As opposed to $10 a month for ever. My wife wants Office for convenience with her old work. I use freeware, libre office. Google Docs gets a bit annoying, so I shy away from it.
As to ChatGPT, all I've done with it is to get a base for code that I have written. It seems like a good way for me to learn python at least. I'd like to learn rust more, but most rust code they have is just translated C code and probably not the best way to use the language. Of course, work for me is 85% bash, 4% sql, 2% powershell, 3% jenkins, 1% kickstart, and a smattering of visual studio, wix, and other Windows horrors.
That's funny.
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