While I was presenting in May, a CEO in the audience related information about a productivity expert promoting human multitasking and providing “Generation Y” with the distractions they want while at the office. You may have followed my blog postings the past two weeks about the disruption of interruptions and the idea of human multitasking.

There is indeed literature promoting what I would call the “distracted work environment” in an effort to attract the “best and brightest” young employees.

I guess I’m old-fashioned, and I’m taking the stand that the “best and brightest” employees will not want to be distracted while performing their duties on the job. From an IT security perspective, this access can be devastating to your business.

The CEO in the audience feels that in order for Gen Y employees to be happy, employers need to provide them access to social media all day long to use at the worker’s discretion. He cited examples of the work environments at Google and other Internet companies. I wonder how many other employers tell themselves it is “ok” to provide distractions to workers.

For Google, and even the marketing professionals at your own organization, it makes sense—even to me—for them to access social media at work since that is part of their job!

To me, promoting social media for non-work-related tasks makes as much sense as keeping a carton of cigarettes readily available and constantly restocked at the desk of someone who is trying to stop smoking.  Sounds more like temptation and torture than being supportive of someone achieving their goal.

I believe in workers feeling happy based on a “job well done” and my appreciation for their accurate and productive work. I believe there are members of Generation Y who take pride in their work and perform to the best of their abilities. I feel it is the employer’s responsibility to provide them with a productive work environment—free of distractions.

Isn’t it enough that the employees can have their own smart phone or other device right next to their desk and use that for their distractions? Need we, as employers, provide the same distraction using a larger screen on company owned equipment? No, you do not—at least not in the summer of 2010. The inappropriate access for non-work-related social media access results in too much lost productivity and too risky for IT security.

You may have seen the short comedy video a wonderful video production firm created for The Foster Institute, Inc. demonstrating the internet misuse that may be going on in your organization. The theme of the video is an office romance gone awry.

One of the more enjoyable parts of blogging is stirring up some controversy, so please post your comments on the blog.

Between two back-to-back engagements in the East earlier this year, the best transportation option was to charter a private flight since other transportation options were more costly in both time and money. I booked the charter under the stipulation that the pilot allow me to sit in the copilot seat rather than “in the back” as long as I promised not to”push any buttons.” The charter service agreed, and it was 2 hours of the beautiful scenery and enlightening conversation!

The weather was beautiful and I was able to increase my knowledge of flying, navigating, aviation radio communications, and the procedures pilots use every day. My experienced and highly capable pilot spoke of how he flew Apache helicopters in the service and we discussed human multitasking—which is important when piloting an Apache. I learned later that a pilot in the book Apache by Ed Macy reports his cockpit video even showed the pilot’s two eyeballs looking in two different directions regularly during times that required multitasking!  I am unsure if the Generation Y employees have the same level of intensive training as Apache helicopter pilots.

Even my pilot, whom I hold in the highest esteem and feel enormous respect for his rotor and fixed wing piloting abilities, transmitted incorrect information through an air traffic control hand-off during our flight. I noticed it as he was transmitting, and the air traffic controller did too because they immediately asked for clarification. The point is, no matter how good we are, we are all humans. Adding multitasking requirements increases the chances for errors.

We live in a day of social media, text messages, e-mail, and constant information being “fed” to us at sometimes an alarming rate. I would find it difficult to use the Internet and e-mail at all without good spam and web content filters to eliminate the data I’m for sure not interested in anyway.

Scientific studies in controlled environment show humans who multitask suffer a precipitous drop in productivity with an associated increase in errors.  Why would we do this to our employees, especially if they are paid by the hour?

Scientists discovered that, rather than multitasking, the brain must perform rapid task-switching. On top of that, the brain must now also monitor to see which task needs attention in the next moment.  This leads to each important task only receiving the partial attention of the human.

On top of that, do you enjoy talking to someone who is not making eye contact and they type furiously while you speak? Most employers want their workers to provide full attention to work-related tasks while on the clock.

Can you or anyone you know effectively do more than one thing at the same time? Please post your comments on the blog.

When CNN ran the story, Study tracks effects of interruptions on doctors, I immediately thought about the effects of interruptions on the “doctors” who take care of your IT—your IT professionals!

If you have seen me speak, or experienced an IT Vital Systems Review audit, you have heard my soap box spiel about how IT professionals all need at least one 45 minute period of uninterrupted time each day to accomplish tasks. My preference is that they get even more than one of those periods.

When solving an IT related issue, planning the next upgrade, or focusing on some other IT related process, it is crucial for the IT professional to be balancing multiple ideas and multiple subjects around in their brain simultaneously. One unnecessary interruption can throw the IT professional back to “square one” again in a nanosecond.

The CNN article says doctors did not even return to almost 20% of the tasks they were doing when interrupted.

Interruptions are dangerous to medical professionals in hospitals, pilots in aircraft, and IT professionals in your organization.

Save them time, and yourself money, by allowing them to work quietly from time to time.  If you have them on staff, IT developers are the same way. Writing code is a thought intensive process.

I was interrupted twice while writing this article. How many times were you interrupted while reading it?

For that matter, some of the CEO’s and other key executives that read these blog postings can benefit from some uninterrupted time as well!  Please post your thoughts on this blog.

Well said!  A lot of executives have expressed a similar concern, though in my 20 years none of them tickled my funny bone so much as that creative question!

There are communication barriers in many organizations, and the “Executives vs. IT” challenges are quite common. The language barrier between “IT terminology” and “plain English” is only the beginning of the problem. The results of so called “personality surveys” are often vastly different. Executives are often visionary and strategic in nature and IT professionals can be very tactical in their thinking.

It also surprises many executives to learn that the IT professional’s deepest concern is often “The boss will be disappointed in me and I will lose my job!”

In my experience, the executives are worried, “If I make the IT professional angry, they may delete all the data on the servers and then quit their job and leave the organization in shambles!”

With IT and the executives both being concerned about the power the other holds, and wanting to remain in the “good graces” of the other, it is easy to see how the communication boundaries can develop and have tall, strong walls.

Another symptom of the barrier is that IT projects often tend to go over budget and finish late.
If you have something you want to tell your IT professionals, tell them! If you want my help, ask. Open up communication and solve some of those lingering problems!

I’m always ok with it when a CEO, President, or owner is not an IT professional. In fact, it is often easier for an IT professional to do their job if the leader of their organization is not always getting in their way!

IT changes so fast, even faster than clothes go out of style. Perhaps executives need to check in with their peers, or even better, IT professionals to be sure their “IT fashion” is not out of date. Sure, LinkedIn is alive and well today, but will they be the CompuServe of tomorrow? Twitter and Face Book are all the rage, but some fear MySpace is on the way out. Google has plans to make all of them obsolete with Google Buzz.

Many of the executives I work with are NOT experts in IT—and I think that is just fine. That’s why they have good IT professionals they trust on staff and/or outsourced.

These days, most organizations already own everything they need to increase their security dramatically higher than it is today. Microsoft servers include tools like event logs, Group Policy Objects, file permissions, user rights, patch management, disk encryption, authentication, certificates, IP Security, and other tools that, while they can be enhanced by add-on products, already have a huge amount of untapped potential in what your company has already invested in. You have already spent the money; please use what you have!

For expenses like corporate anti-virus, until the criminal hackers decide to use their skills for good rather than evil, this is something you budget for. Look at the ROI. Almost any company can justify a solid backup program, if not a full disaster recovery plan when you perform a risk assessment and calculate the amount you can lose without a backup. If you are investing more than $100 per year per user on IT security, perhaps you can reduce your spending and still be well protected. As one of my clients in Houston recently told me, “We don’t want to be as secure as the Pentagon.” Well said.

Additionally, I find many of my clients are moving to thin client technology and investing in virtualization. These moves do often take an initial investment, however the total cost of ownership over the next three years will sometimes be dramatically less than staying with the existing infrastructure. Even if the total cost of ownership will stay the same, there are often huge increases in security and user productivity. And, amazingly, often the transition to the new infrastructure can happen gradually over a few years to reduce the yearly investment and start realizing the ROI right away where the technology will have the most benefit—such as for remote users. Thin client computing and virtualization are addressed elsewhere in this blog. Please add your comments.

I use Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome all three. It really depends on what I am doing and what features I need. Chrome is my favorite when I need to do research on the web because Chrome is so fast.

If you want to, download the browser here http://www.google.com/chrome/index.html and give it a try. The cost is zero dollars – and that is good. Post your experience as a reply in my blog.

As inexpensive as monitors are these days, consider treating yourself and your most productive employees to dual monitor systems. Even if you just try a few users first for a trial, you may find why many organizations swear they will never go back to single monitors for their users again.

Microsoft offers a trial download so you can see if you like it too before you pay any money.  The layout is very simple. You create “notebooks” that have colored tab sections. Each section contains multiple pages. Each “page” can be many pages long and contain information you copy and paste from web sites, other documents, e-mail messages, etc.

I have notebooks for books I’m working on, notes to myself, etc. In my Books notebook, I make tabs for each one of my books. Inside each book, I create pages for each event and the characters in the book. That way, I can easily drag and drop pages if I decide to rearrange the action in my book.

I handle presentations the same way as books – makes it very easy for me to storyboard the presentation before creating the slides, flash, and videos.

Instead of leaving messages in my e-mail “inbox” I can organize them: Requests from clients go into my “actions” tab on the “customer requests” page so I handle them quickly. Articles I want to read go into my “research” tab onto a page that describes the type of research. When I’m ready to research – everything is organized.

I find many applications allow me to right click and “send to OneNote” too.  I used to keep so many lists in Word. I have a detailed file structure so I can find the word documents when I need them. Thinking of “one idea” takes a few minutes to enter including having to find, open, edit, and save the Word file. Now all my lists are in one easy to reach place whenever I need them.

This economy has resulted in my being very busy and I am finding new tools to increase productivity. OneNote is one of my favorite applications now. Give it a try.

If you are a Mac user, I’m told there is a similar program called Circus Ponies Notebook from  www.circusponies.com.

It is a sad fact that, unless you have the proper safeguards in place, your end users are using up an enormous amount of your IT department’s time. This costs your organization money. Not just in pay to your IT professionals, but also in downtime, upset customers, and maybe even damage to your branding.

There are many tools to restrict users and your qualified IT professionals know about them. Group Policy Objects, for example, are already included in your Windows server operating systems so there is “nothing more to buy” to begin restricting users. There are also Internet content filters – both free and reasonably priced options.

Restriction can be granular in case your CFO wants to listen to internet radio but does not want anyone else to be able to use up bandwidth in this way.  You can start by restricting a small group of users and expand your restrictions as you streamline your protection.