THE MORNING RANT: “Software as a Service” - a.k.a. Software That Prevents Employees From Getting Work Done

How was Twitter able to let go of 80% of its workforce without a negative impact to its customers? The answer, of course, is that few employees at Twitter were doing anything productive.

Were they busy? Quite possibly. I have observed in other workplaces (perhaps including some where I have worked) that employees are extremely busy just trying to keep up with all the SaaS (“Software as a Service”) programs that must be constantly engaged, at the expense of doing actual work.

Just staying logged in and keeping passwords updated is a burden. In a typical workplace, you may need 5 to 10 of these SaaS programs open at all times, but the IT department is hell-bent on logging you out if you neglect to use any of these programs for more than 10 or 15 minutes. Getting logged out means that you will have to waste 5 minutes or so logging back in, while each pop-up and radio button during the log-in process prevents you from doing any other work during this time.

Dilbert’s “Preventer of Information Services” smiles whenever you are kicked out of a program.

It’s an especially critical problem when there are fewer software licenses than employees for a particular SaaS. Once you are successfully logged in, you operate with a hoarder’s mindset, obsessing above all else about staying logged in, since you may not get access again that day.

So, a typical employee nowadays may find that his primary daily task is constantly clicking on the various SaaS programs to avoid being logged out.

If I were a fan of inefficiency, I’d applaud the fact that infrequently-used SaaS programs require password updates more frequently than the software actually needs to be used, resulting in an obsolete password every time a user tries to log in.

Isaac Simpson had a piece at The American Mind last week that captured in words how bad the situation is. The thesis of his piece was actually about marketing agencies and the Bud Light debacle, but in talking about workplace culture at marketing agencies, he brilliantly described how SaaS is strangling productivity out of corporate American workplaces.

We Must Seize the Means of Propaganda [American Mind – 4/25/2023]

Several years ago, I joined a mainstream marketing agency in a creative direction role. This is the list of SaaS, or Software as a service, programs I was required to use to do the job.

He then lists 31 programs, which I presume many of you are tormented by familiar with.

Most of my time was spent logging in and out of these programs with our SSO software, which rarely worked, needed to be constantly updated, and broke links to the programs it was supposed to be securing, all of which required two-factor authentication lest our top-secret brand fonts and colors be leaked to the public.

Heh.

The most pernicious software, however, is that which has the user constantly giving updates about what he is doing, which takes the employee away from actually doing any real work.

By far the evilest SaaS was Adobe’s project-management software, aptly-named Workfront; advancing the front of work without producing anything. It allowed my…management team to assign and re-assign tasks, edit calendars, send reminders, click “in-progress” and “complete” checkboxes, update various statuses from red to yellow to green, and track billable hours down to the minute, all while demanding that we do the same.

Red / Yellow / Green software is so embarrassingly childish. Even worse is when “task status” software requires daily essays on what is keeping you from getting tasks done, what you’ve learned from overcoming obstacles on this task, etc. I’ve never used Workfront, but it sounds like other productivity-sapping SaaS I’ve had to use.

We spent the majority of our days on Workfront managing the work we were supposed to be doing without ever actually doing any of it: levers floating in space, connected to nothing, switching back and forth forever into eternity. We tracked hours in the tracking software, tagged team members in the calendar software, had four to six hours of meetings in the meeting software, then signed off at 3 p.m. and called it a day. My role writing ideas, concepts, and content for large brands in reality required only one program—Google Docs. But the amount of time doing actual conceiving and writing was maybe—and I mean this seriously—three to four hours a week.

The corporate workplace would be so much more efficient if corporate executives could start learning to say “No” to the software industrial complex.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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