Kathy has an excellent post today on what happens when the “policies and procedures tail” wags the “user happiness dog.” I continually remind my IT team here at Resurrection that our job is to serve users, not the other way around. My team has a lot of ideas about how to increase our efficiency, which I think is great so long as it doesn’t make things more diffcult for those we serve. Do you advocate for users in your organization?

“As a Mac user, I wish Microsoft would run an Apple-like ad about the process by which Mac users get service for broken hardware. It would be really hard for Apple to respond, because their system for dealing with broken hardware is itself horribly broken. They need serious incentives to fix this.” – Dave Winer

Just last week my team at Resurrection and I were joking about exactly this idea. (We support both PCs and Macs.) The Apple commercials are terribly funny, no doubt. But Apple would have you believe that their stuff never breaks. In our parody commercial, Mac would be broken and a poor, hapless user would be striken by the question, “How do I fix this thing?” PC would answer, “I don’t know.” Then the user would ask, “Who DOES know?” Followed by nothing but dead silence.

When PC is broken, we call our friendly Dell service person, who comes out a day or two later and fixes it. It’s painless and nearly effortless. When Mac is broken, we are faced with a small number of bad options, all of which will cost us a lot more time and brain damage than calling Dell. Surely Dave Winer and us aren’t the only ones who have faced this issue. Does Apple care?

I’ve posted before about the importance of visual communication in our world. Unfortunately, I’ve spent my whole life honing my ability to communicate with words. That skill will be nearly obsolete by the end of my life. Seth Godin points us to an example of how ordinary people can use video technology to communicate. Wouldn’t it be cool to use this video to teach church staff about web technology? Would it be even cooler for all of us to learn how to communicate this way?