please empty your brain below
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Oh ho ho ho. We have a similar system in my workplace. The upshot has been, first, that people who are paid quite a lot to do some really quite complex tasks now spend time ordering sandwiches and / or finding a member of the admin staff who will admit that it is in fact in their job description to order sandwiches (and put up notices, collect rsvps, etc). Second, without a human watchdog rooms are booked 'just in case' and then not unbooked, which means that if you are desperate for a room you can't find one, yet on the day there will be five meetings that didn't happen and in fact were just an evil glint in someone's eye when the rooms were booked 'just in case' several months ago. Good luck.
Antipodean | 18.11.10 - 7:15 a.m. | #
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Yes, new things come along, making old jobs obsolete. Yes, it's sad that people lose their jobs.
However..
It would be a really sad state of affairs if there were no progress making these jobs obsolete!
It's not like these people losing their jobs can never find another job. As the world progresses, you might not need to hire people for booking meeting rooms any more, but new types of jobs will emerge (*).
(* this all holds true until we're all replaced by superior robots, but that won't happen for a few years yet).
magnus | 18.11.10 - 7:38 a.m. | #
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This has happened since time immemorial though: look at how many people in this country once worked the land, or were domestic servants... And it's only 70 or 80 years ago.
Things move on, and, provided we don't outsource the remaining/newly created jobs to Foreign (so losing both jobs and the skills needed to do jobs), everything will be fine. Ah... yes... therein lies the problem...
Blue Witch | Homepage | 18.11.10 - 7:44 a.m. | #
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Two minutes to book the room and 3 hours to get a time in everyone else's diary when they can make a meeting. Good luck.
ganching | Homepage | 18.11.10 - 8:19 a.m. | #
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I tend to agree with andipodean. These things always get messed up because someone books rooms just in case, or books rooms every week for a meeting, and then forgets to cancel them when the meeting is discontinued. And I bet it won't be too long before they put in an over-ride, so that someone important can gazump bookings made by lesser mortals. Never underestimate the capacity of organizations to generate unnecessary complexity, and the need to bring someone in to sort it all out...
Baldassaro | 18.11.10 - 9:19 a.m. | #
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Indeed, I wrote a room booking system with the following results.
(1) Certain members of staff refused to get their heads around such complex issues as clicking a mouse on a time slot, checking a check box to make it a repeating event and shift-clicking to book other resources, like laser pointers and projectors, at the same time and so the secretaries were given 'Masquerade rights' whereby they could make the booking on behalf of someone else, but that someone else still retained edit and delete rights.
(2) Some students booked the large seminar room for 8 straight hours for an external meeting for which they charged a fee without any of that coming to the centre. Result - nobody but the two secretaries could book resources for more than two hours a day.
(3) Someone booked the large room, used for coffee club and lunch, for a meeting at the same time as coffee club without (a) booking the smaller room for coffee and lunch and (b) telling anyone so that people wandered into a seminar with cups of coffee and started chatting and relaxing. Result - reprogrammed so that only secretaries could make bookings that covered 11:00-11:30 and 13:00-14:00 meaning that they (the only thoughtful ones around!) could put up advance notices and move or cancel coffee club etc.
In other words, it was self-service so long as you didn't take the piss, the secretaries workload was reduced but the roles weren't subsumed completely.
To summarise: people are a problem.
Audrey | 18.11.10 - 10:34 a.m. | #
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You highlight a serious problem with the way things are going. It is not the most menial jobs that are going, or the high skill/creative, but a hollowing out of the middle.
Steve | 18.11.10 - 11:38 a.m. | #
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Argh this is a nightmare for us. Our company was taken over a couple of years and and then merged last year into a new office in Holborn (possibly one that DG had vacated previously). We new merged company has now split into two sister companies, all using the same MS Outlook to handle bookings. We now seem to have 4 separate holiday lists to check when arranging meetings, which each have to be checked before booking one of the rooms. On top of that, Laptops, projectors etc, have to be invited to the meeting, but invariably they are never available on the day because they 'didnt reply to the invite'. If I had any hair left I'd be pulling it out on an almost daily basis.
Steve | 18.11.10 - 1:01 p.m. | #
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All the meeting rooms in the BBC are named after classic TV shows.
I have my regular weekly team-breifing in "The two Ronnies", my yearly appraisal in "Only Fools and Horses" and I go out of my way onc in a while to book "Doctor Who" room, just becaue i'm a fan - even though it's not on the floor where I work.
Who says your license fee isn't well spent? :)
geofftech | Homepage | 18.11.10 - 1:12 p.m. | #
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I liked the meeting rooms in the Bluefin building, which are named after typefaces. I'd love to have a meeting in the Helvetica or Baskerville rooms. But perhaps not in Comic Sans...
Baldassaro | 18.11.10 - 4:21 p.m. | #
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If the Chinese can ship a pair of jeens to the UK for 60p or a TV for £2. then we in the UK have to be more productive. Anyway why aren't you using a Video Conference System?
Peter | 18.11.10 - 4:34 p.m. | #
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One of the many reasons I'm glad that I'm RETIRED.
Michael | 18.11.10 - 5:02 p.m. | #
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There is no such thing as efficiency savings, ultimately all money ends up in the hands of people because that is the only place it has any value.
Another Andrew | 18.11.10 - 5:20 p.m. | #
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We have an automated room booking system at work. Sometimes it even works.
The problem of booking rooms and then not using them is solved quite easily: our departments are charged a room-booking fee (based on room size and duration) for each booking so we have an incentive not to overbook.
Mouse A Nony | 18.11.10 - 7:10 p.m. | #
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Our rooms just have boring numbers and when they introduced the automated system it no doubt put people out of work but boy did it make things more efficient.
Mark | Homepage | 18.11.10 - 7:57 p.m. | #
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Deskilling the workplace has been going on since the start of industrialation or longer. I am (just) old enough to remember a typing pool at my Dad's work and have seen dozens of skilled lithographers replaced by CAD at my own.
Oliver | 19.11.10 - 1:25 a.m. | #
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You win some, you lose some, I fear, DG. I have heard tell, from the "GPO" section of my family, of long-departed manual telephone exchanges serving small villages in the Pennine foothills where the operator would not only know that the person you were calling was out, but also where they were likely to be at the moment and would you like to put through to that number instead.
Edwin Greenwood | Homepage | 19.11.10 - 9:15 a.m. | #
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A colleague of mine who retired recently told me that when he started working in a central London office, they still had lift attendants. You had to tell them which floor you were going to, and if it was fewer than two up or three down, you were told to use the stairs. Probably helped to promote a healthy staff, as well as providing employment.
Baldassaro | 19.11.10 - 1:54 p.m. | #
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new types of jobs will emerge*.
*This all holds true until we're all replaced by superior robots, but that won't happen for a few years yet).
You say this as if all jobs lost due to either we can make someone else do it cheaper/we can make someone else work harder/longer/technological progression will be replaced at a 1-for-1 rate until such time as they’re all suddenly, en masse, magically replaced by automated systems, and we all can enjoy the benefits of a leisure society.
25-HOUR WORKWEEK NOW
Drummer Boy | Homepage | 01.12.13 - 7:04 a.m. | #
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