You are an IT people supporting the business applications for the company. And for several years you have heard such a saying around you: “I don’t know how to operate in this system. No one in my department tells me how to do it. Maybe it is IT’s job to teach me since it is an “IT” system.”

      Ten years ago people were even amazing at who could skillfully operate in Excel and the like. But today we take it for granted that everyone knows how to use Excel when he/she enters the company. We don’t even question the competence level of computers skill when they are recruited. The result is that more and more silly questions on Outlook and Excel are coming to IT helpdesk. However things are not stopped there.

      During the ten years, information technology has been making its bigger progress in the company:
      Excel Fourth shift and SAP. These tools are evolved from individual tool, to integrated tools, and finally to highly integrated and fully business-covered one. These tools, on other hand, are also changing from standard one to the non-standard one, i.e. business-dependent, which you can not simply learn it from your university or from your previous job. These tools are growing from simple tool to a highly sophisticated one which needs longer training time and more resources on it. However we are still somehow paralyzed toward it so far.

      We are the IT department whose task is to build, maintain and improve the business systems for the company. But this is not the very end. The ultimate purpose is to have whole company benefit from the accurate, useful and timely information of these systems. However in order to achieve this target, IT department alone is far from enough to do it. The effort from the whole company is needed, especially those users to system. In a highly integrated system, one puts data into system probably will not benefit the data oneself but other do. If a user puts wrong data into the system, or a user mistakenly operates in the system, the other would not get correct answer from it.

      In one word, the word IT can be split into two letters “I” and “T”. IT department after all only takes care of “T”, i.e. Technology or “Tools” for simplicity. But the whole company owns “I”, i.e. the valued information. It is quite critical for everyone to realized it and treat the information properly in the system. And they need to be better trained.

      We are all glad that SAP system has gone alive. But it is not over. According to some statistics, the cost to maintain the SAP system is usually five times to the initial investment. And the most part of the maintenance cost results from the requirement change and the training to new staff. The realization of the requirement change also results in the training to all users in the end. So in the company full of versatile and flexible requirements we were once proud of, and with high staff turn-over, IT training will definitely be an important point which no one can avoid and a mature company must face.（Qian Wei）