At each one of our remote locations, there is an area that essentially is day care center. Currently the setup is similar to one of those kids areas that you see at McDonalds with a jungle gym area, but also with a few TVs and video games and a larger area.
The Operations Manager calls me into his office and discusses his plans for these day care areas. Right now, about half of the day care areas have a PC setup to check the kids in and to insure that their parents are actually paying for the service. He wanted to make sure that we had a roll out schedule for the rest of the branches. I told him that it shouldn’t be a problem and that we’ll get the PCs ordered.
Then he says: “Oh yeah, and I also want computers in each day care area for the children to use. How long will that take?”
Well considering I really had no idea what he was talking about and felt blind sided by this request, I asked, “Um, well what do you mean you want the children to use them? What would they be using it for?”
He proceeded to explain to me that one of the competitors has a setup where they have computers setup so that the kids can do their homework, play with some learning programs and similar software. They had those terminals set up instead of the video game kiosks that we have. I asked if we would be doing away with the video games. He said no, we’d be keeping those. I asked, “Well, do you think the kids are going to want to learn, or would they rather play video games?” He said that they were mostly there for the parents’ benefit and that we was sure the kids wouldn’t use them much. I asked why should we implement them if the parents are already paying for the service?
Of course, this was an argument that was doomed from the start. So now, in addition to the full month that I already have, I also have to research children’s learning programs. So in conclusion we’ll be paying thousands of dollars just to match up with the competition and deploy around 30 computers that will probably rarely be used. The IT Department loses again!
