Ideas and Suggestions

Problems

Considering the fast pace computing technologies are advancing, several problems are created which management must deal with. They include:

1. Keeping technical staff able to use the technologies.
2. Keeping the cost of training down as the pace and complexity of technology increases.
3. Determining when a technology may help the company.
4. Determining when new technology may help make a new product producible or bring the cost of a current product to lower levels.

Solutions

Learning and Knowledge

Keeping the technical staff up to date and not having costs skyrocket is becoming an increasing problem. There are some possible ways to help remedy these problems as follows:

• Formal Training - Some degree of formal training should always be done in the organization. This increases morale along with helping staff members to learn.
• Educational Reimbursement - Organizations today should have an excellent educational reimbursement policy in order to encourage employees to increase their own training. They should also reward those that use these benefits by recognizing them and promoting them when it is appropriate.
• Self Training - Employees should be encouraged to train themselves through book reading and other means as is possible. It would be an excellent idea to allow employees to select books for purchase to be added to a company or group library. This form of training is much lower cost than most other forms.
• Web based organizations - Work with and contribute training materials to web based organizations. In this way costs are shared among several organizations.
• Organizational Cooperation - Work with other non competing organizations to share training and technical research costs. Many times organizations in unrelated industries may utilize the same technology for different purposes.
• Specialization - Have some people specialize in specific areas, then let them cross train to some extent as necessary. An example is a markup language expert. This expert can learn a new markup language easier due to familiarity in this category.
• Cross Training - For each expert in a specific area have at least one staff member be a secondary expert. The expert would act as mentor and leader for the secondary expert. This way if anything happens to either employee the knowledge is retained. Also this policy allows employees to show leadership. The secondary expert may be a primary expert in another area.
• Internal Teaching - Have primary and secondary experts either teach or producing teaching materials for other employees to use. The ability to do this will depend on staff ability to teach others or produce worthwhile materials. The advantage in producing these materials is in removing the additional reading in many books and the material can be geared to specific organizational applications.

These are merely suggestions for possible solutions to technical learning problems. Some of these suggestions may work well for your ogranization and others may not.

Determining When to Use Technology

• Form a task group made up of marketing and development staff to research ideas and meet periodically (monthly) to conceptualize potentially new technical products. Give the technical and marketing staff equality with equal importance of roles and authority. This group would produce recommendations for upper management.