Should the staff at a Technology Company be able to use Technologies?

I keep wondering whether the people who work at technology companies need to be good users of technology in general, let alone whether they should be users of their own technologies. The latter is harder to determine as not all technology company products are usable by a broad audience. After all, how many people need to know how to configure a provisioning platform?

But shouldn't folks working at tech companies be really comfortable using personal computers, and PC software? Should people who communicate be at least advanced users of communications software? (Meaning in this case Word and Outlook and their cousins.)

For the twenty years I've been in this business, I've seen that for most companies, user training is an after-thought except when something brand new is installed. Once the system is up and running for a while, even training of new employees falls by the wayside.

If employees don't know how to really use the software they use every day, who suffers? Them? Well, they could be wasting time trying to do manually that which the computer would do automatically. (A friend calls this electronic pencil pushing.) Corporate security could be compromised, even if users are supposedly trained on "correct usage" where security is concerned, there are so many ways around the systems, that it's not improbable that best practices will not be used.

The converse of this is in applications designed by and for end-users without consultation with IT on best practices, security, integration with other programs and so forth. Current corporate governance standards are supposed to prevent this, but we all know that users will go around the strictest guidelines, especially if they have their own power centers or simply feel entitled.

Major technology companies, especially software ones, do use their products as much as possible. But if my experience is common, many employees, even at senior technical levels, don't take advantage of what's made available to them. It could at best be said they are using PC's with the same level of capability that they exhibited when the personal computer was new.

I used to think this was because it was hard to use the more advanced features, software offers, but I'm coming to the realization that for most people, the features don't matter. They don't care if they spend extra time doing something manually that could be done automatically. They don't want to be bothered with learning how.

And they'll learn convoluted complex procedures to get around the automation if they're unwilling to learn the simpler automation because they're afraid.

So who cares? The companies keep making new versions with more and better features that are used by fewer and fewer people. The decision makers don't care since they're often the least likely to be capable users themselves. Or if they care, they're the ones who instigated the convoluted, non-inter-operable mess in the first place.