Getting Creative at work with Tech

In my opinion everyone should be looking at how to make things better. Whether it be in their personal life or their professional life. There are always interesting things to do and fun challenges to tackle. 

The question for many technology professionals invariably is where to start? I mostly advise going after the most annoying problems first where feasible. For example let's say you have lots of documents that others want to use. Can you convert them to wikis? How about making them searchable via a search engine? Turn them into training materials? You could also look at storing them into a small distributed database like Hadoop, where you could store and retrieve them. For a technology professional there are lots of opportunities to experiment with some of the latest approaches and make practical prototypes from them.

Admittedly there are other more simple solutions like deleting them, moving them over to someone else, etc. Document management may not be your cup of tea. However it is the thought that counts. There are lots of other opportunities as well.

This does sound like making work when you do not have to. However there is a very pragmatic side to this form of learning. Your future. Technologies come and go, rise and fall over the years. What is a solid practice today will fade for a time perhaps to be resurrected once again. However as a professional technologist you have to be prepared to adapt with these changes over the course of your career. The lifecycle of technology adoption is far more rapid now than it ever has. What used to be 10 year cycles have been compressed to only a fraction of that time. 

Being creative with how you tackle problems gives you the chance to not only learn something new and keep your skills sharp, but it also helps make your learning practical by keeping it to something you are familiar with.

Start small, do something you care about, and that you can manage. But start. In tough economic times such as these, very few companies are going to spend the necessary money to send you to expensive courses to bring your skills up to par.