The heaviest user of our systems is a woman in the picking aisles of our largest depot. She scans around nine hundred items a shift, every one of them a transaction in the order system, which is more interactions with our software in a day than I have in a month. She has no company mailbox. She has never opened the intranet. She has never contacted the service desk, because the terminal she uses belongs to the depot, and when it stops working she tells her supervisor.
Roughly two thirds of the people this company employs work like that. Drivers, depot staff, field engineers, laboratory technicians, cleaners, the site teams. My department's tooling, our policies and a great deal of our instinct are built for the other third, the ones who have a laptop and an address and can be reached by sending them a link.
The gap shows everywhere once you look for it. Our identity model assumes a mailbox, so a password reset needs an inbox the person does not have and a second factor lands on a phone we never issued. Announcements go out by email, which means the majority of the workforce learns about a change from a printed sheet by the time clock or not at all. Training is a link. The service desk offers a portal and an email address. Asset management assumes one device per person rather than one device per shift. Our security controls assume a computer we manage rather than a shared terminal in a cold building.
None of this is getting smaller. The direction of travel is more software at the front line, not less, and better software: scheduling, proof of delivery, compliance checks, sensors, cameras that count things. Those people are becoming the majority of our system users while remaining a minority of our accounts, and nothing about how we buy, support or secure systems has caught up.
The work I can see coming is identity that does not depend on a mailbox, shared devices with a fast personal sign in, applications that behave sensibly when a yard has no signal, hardware chosen for gloves and cold, and support that can be reached by someone holding a scanner.
For most of my career the typical user of a corporate system was someone sitting down. The next decade of my job is building for people who are standing up.
– Serguey Shinder
