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.

The problem with data breaches is that sometimes, after the breach, it is too late to save the company. Remember the company Fly Clear? I have earned, and spent, more than 6 Million Miles in my frequent flyer account at a major airline. Fly Clear allowed me to bypass the lines at airport security and added a huge amount of quality time back to my family. Then, Fly Clear lost a laptop at a Northern California airport, and I got a letter about the possible breach. In the letter, the CEO said he didn’t know why they were not encrypting all the hard drives at the company to protect client data, but they would from then on. Yeah, from then on until his company closed its doors. Who wanted to give all their private security information to a company that loses it? Fly Clear did close their doors—less than a year later. This closing, and others like it, is so sad because it was likely preventable.

The Fly Clear CEO seemed angry at his IT department for not telling him ahead of time about the importance of full disk encryption—a common feeling among executives who are angry at IT after a breach. Full disk encryption is just one of the many strategies companies can use to protect themselves.

It amazes me how few CEO’s and other executives have ever learned about full disk encryption—and sometimes their IT professionals have not heard of it either. I find that understandable since IT has so many specializations and, just like cardiologists do not necessarily know all about neurology, a company may not have an IT security professional on staff to make security recommendations. Come to think of it, my consulting business revolves around being that outsourced IT security specialist for companies.

For 2010, I encourage you to have some conversations with IT professionals, qualified in IT security, about the status of your IT security and what you can do to increase it.

For real—you can find companies that will work with you for a flat rate. They are rare, but they are often the best IT companies to work with. They are sharing the responsibility with you to get the systems up and running quickly. If they drag out a project, they are losing money right along with you. I think that is fair. IF they finish sooner, you both win, and they’ve earned their money.

Some executives tell me, “We found a new IT company that only charges $50 per hour instead of our old company that was $150 per hour. Aren’t we smart?” I explain that the hourly rate is irrelevant without knowing how long they take to accomplish a task. You would much rather pay $150 to a company that solves a problem in an hour than pay another company $150 for 3 hours of work to solve the same issue, especially if they gave you an estimate of $50 to being with.

The most important part is defining the scope clearly from the beginning. Planning is usually a good thing anyway!

I work with my clients on a flat fee basis.

When you outsource, I strongly encourage you to find an IT company that will work with you for a flat fee per project as well! Your projects will be more on time and in budget.

IT professionals naturally, as most of us would, gain a great feeling of satisfaction when they swoop in to save the day. The real question I ask of the IT team during an audit is, “Why did the problem develop to begin with?” I’d rather there never be a problem and, when you see your IT professionals, it is to talk strategically about your IT systems rather than to solve another emergency.

Some of the IT professionals at the companies who’s executives bring me in to audit their systems say, “Thank you Mike. You taught us to drain the swamp so we could stop killing alligators. Once the swamp was drained, most of the alligators left.”

Some of the biggest encouragement you executives can provide your in-house and IT professionals are to focus on the following areas:

• Strategic—IT professionals who are too bogged down in tactics fail to discuss important decisions with executives. A perfect example is whether or not the company wants to use full disk encryption on some or all of your computers. Too often the first the executives ever hear of full disk encryption is when they learn it is not installed and they are about to have to mail a letter to all the clients since a laptop was lost or stolen.
• Automation—Servers can, when configured properly, do a lot of the work automatically that your IT professionals may be wasting time doing manually.
• Central Management—IT professionals can configure the network so they can use one quick tool on one computer to take care of every computer in your organization—without having to visit every computer. The money savings and increased security can be staggering.
• Metrics—IT can provide you with useful information such as most common help desk requests so you can reduce the causes, statistics on what web sites your employees visit most often so you can control bandwidth, and can sometimes bring information from two different programs together using business intelligence tools to give you important metrics related to your sales, processes, or even client demographics.

These are all a much better use of time and money than for your IT professionals to be fixing the same old problems they keep fixing every week.

Dual monitors can pay for themselves quickly with increased worker productivity.  If a worker’s productivity is increased even only 9%, and you calculate 9% of their yearly pay, you can see what a bargain the dual monitors are as long as the employee is busy.

Another way of looking at this is that if you have a $50K/year employee who is overloaded and frequently flips between windows on their screen during the day to get work done, your choices to improve their work production at least 9% include:

• Hire a new part time employee for $4.5K/year, plus HR costs, plus find a place for them to sit and work, buy them a computer and monitor, and spend time and money training them.
• Or, get the first employee a second monitor for $300.

The prices are much lower than ever before. You can find high resolution 25.5-Inch widescreen LCD monitors for less than $300 each.  Most modern workstations support dual monitors—even many laptops.

Would you consider working on a desk that was 19″ or smaller diagonally? These days, the computer screen is your “desk.” Most desks are huge compared to the size of a single computer monitor.

Users who try two monitors and see how productive they can be never go back.

The IT professionals can use tools like anti-virus, firewalls, application and OS patches, etc. Many IT professionals are not using the tools as effectively as they could, and frequently aren’t using them at all on one or more computers. None of the tools are “set and forget”—all of them have to be monitored.

I feel the executive’s real challenge is, “I don’t know how to help my IT professional fight viruses.”

Responsible executives:

• Provide enough uninterrupted time for the IT professionals so the IT professionals can get their work done.
• Allow ongoing training for the IT professionals to keep up with ever changing technology.
• Hold the IT department accountable for fixing issues discovered during an audit.
• Provide managerial support for policies that support security—such as forcing computer screen savers to lock after a period of inactivity.