Yes, I made up the word “teckified” so I suppose that I have to make up a definition as well. It means “to use technology efficiently, including having databases which talk to each other, or better yet, a single database.”
If you are in the medical profession or the legal profession, you are likely not teckified. Teck-afraid perhaps, but probably not teckified.
Whether or not you are teckified matters. Allow me to explain.
You may be familiar with the theory that legal clients do not understand the law, so they judge law firms based on other criteria, such as efficiency and speed of service.
Let me contrast that to the medical profession.
I had some minor surgery a while ago. At the registration desk they asked me for my name and my birthday and sent me upstairs.
Upstairs, they asked me for my name and my birthday and gave me one of those degrading gowns which hospitals love. Once I was (barely) covered up, they put me on a gurney and the doctor eventually came over and confirmed my name and birthday.
After some time waiting around, they wheeled me into the operating room where they asked me my name and my birthday and to confirm why I was there. The correct answer to that last question was to fix the carpel tunnel syndrome on my right hand. If I had provided the wrong name, given the wrong birthday, or said, ‘to amputate my left leg,” I imagine that lights would have flashed, sirens would have gone off and everything would have ground to a halt until the problem was sorted out.
The operation went well, I can feel my fingers again, and the medical profession did an excellent job of fixing what forty years hunched over a computer typing contracts and emails had ruined.
I get why the medical profession asked me for the same information over and over, and I was pleased to provide it and to do anything else which would have ensured that I would wake up after the operation with my hand fixed and both of my legs still attached. The hospital may not have been teckified, but all was good. I judged my surgery by the results. I could not care less about how efficient their operation was.
But the legal profession is different. I doubt that our long-term clients are impressed when the real estate partner has to ask them for the names of the five corporations which the client owns and how to spell them, or the estates lawyer sends out a form to be filled in by hand with the details of the real estate and the shares which the client owns, all of which information is in separate databases administered by different departments in the firm.
And it would be nice if clients were not left to think, “if my lawyers are rinky-dink in how they manage information and communicate with clients, I wonder how good they are at the law stuff.”
Maybe it is time to teckify. You can find out what Appara thinks about that here: https://bit.ly/3SfZ380