Technology

Business users have lots of ideas for tools and add-ons that could improve daily operations — for instance, adding a workflow to an asset tracking application to govern how new assets are added into inventory. But with many IT departments caught up in initiatives around mobile, the IoT, cloud migration and other digital transformation efforts, it can be hard to get attention for day-to-day departmental workflow issues.

&For our customers, particularly in middle-market and larger enterprises, the need they have for software is far outstripping the supply of IT and developer resources available,& says Jay Jamison, Quick Base senior vice president of strategy and product management.

This contract programmer pilot fish frequently gets urgent requests from IT shops that farm out software projects to his company -- and by now he's pretty sure he knows just what that means.

"We get these 'urgent' requests from the software developers all the time," says fish. "I think the 'urgent' part is their deadline, not the business-side customer's.

"The actual users can be really slow about getting around to using the software sometimes, especially if it changes what they see on their computer.

"We had one customer whose client-server application was being moved to the web. They killed four different rewrites of the application from three different contractors, simply because it involved change for the users.

Susan Bradley, the driving force behind the patchmanagement.org mailing list, really wants to know: What do you, as an individual, think about Windows updates

Shestarted two SurveyMonkey surveys that ask for your feedback on Windows patching, the quality of Windows patches, and the pace of &feature updates& (which most of us would identify as version changes).

If you&re riding herd over a bunch of machines & say, you&re an IT pro with a managed network, or a consultant who regularly deals with enterprise patching & take the first survey.