Here we sit, during what should be our lunch hour, in a meeting. The best of the best of the HBAS IT and finance minds are all gathered together to hear about our past, present and future. The goal – Information Exchange; personal communication to the lowly workers such as myself.
So, we’re in this meeting, in complete ignorance of the lunch time that is upon us, listening to someone we can no more than mumble that we can’t decipher. We’re using a video conference system that is pointed at a mostly dark conference room in Martinsville, Indiana – lights are mostly out due to the powerpoint presentation being projected onto the wall.
We do not get to see the speaker. We are viewing the darkened audience. We are using a video conference system for a completely wasteful purpose.
Participants in Martinsville, where the CFO located today, have all been fed a company paid lunch. Martinsville participants are all content to sit in a conference room for as long as they can because the only thing they are missing is work.
Remote participants are hungry. We were expecting an expensed lunch. Instead, our director gave a “you’re crazy” look when asked if he was buying us lunch.
Take a break to stretch? Are you fucking kidding me? Get this damn meeting over with so that I can go eat some lunch and get on with my fucking life!
This is far from an efficient means of communication. No, not only that, this is not even an effective means of communication. I will leave this meeting knowing nothing more than I did when I sat down.
Poor dude; standing up there – presenting. He’s nervous, hands probably sweating, and no one is really listening. Our director, sitting a couple chairs down from me, is doing paperwork. The Martinsville participants are all engrossed in food-coma daydreams. We remote participants are daydreaming and planning our subsequent lunch escape (which will surely happen as soon as we leave this room).
How is it, that we have not yet figured out how to exchange informationin a way that’s useful? Young Urban Professionals always complain about meetings. Shit, everyone complains about meetings – how much of a waste of time they are; how non-productive they can be. Yet we keep scheduling them. We keep falling victim to the same old paradigms.
Its as if we have no other choice. This is the only option, there are no alternatives.
We have all this technology surrounding us, but no on knows what to do with it. Instead of making our lives easier, its making everyones lives more complex.
I suppose I shouldn’t complain, because it is job security, afterall. But I find it very dissapointing. I see all this cool stuff happening, all this technological potential. But here I sit, in a conference room with people huddled around a laptop, watching shadows on a small video screen, and listening to a muffled audio conference.
For this meeting today, we used: Webex conferencing, Wireless LAN, Wired LAN, Audio conferencing, Video conferencing.
All this technology, for nothing really useful. They could have drawn the contents of the powerpoint presentation on a placemat with a crayon and sent it USPS to me, and I probably would have gotten more out of the information than I did from the nearly 2 hour meeting we had today.
But, I got to hear current and future designs described as :
“As-Is Application architecture” and “To-Be Application Architecture”
and the phrases:
“The core of our To-Be Architecture” and “We need to evolve and get better with it”