| Culture Eats Technology For Breakfast

A rapid Friday reminder that we have to concentrate on what is important, regardless of all the day-to-day complexities and troubles of know-how!…

All too frequently I see tasks failing not since the systems are not doing work, but due to the fact not ample consideration has been compensated to the men and women staying displaced.

For illustration, various many years ago an govt dashboard undertaking was really virtually derailed by a person of the executive assistants. The dashboard was created to change and automate a lot of hours of manual function that the assistant experienced been carrying out for a long time.

The IT workforce naively disregarded the implications for the assistant herself. She wasn’t thanked for all the hard function that she had been doing, that was vital for the jogging of the corporation. Irrespective of her deep know-how in what data was demanded, what difficulties there were with the data sources, etc., she was not integrated in the challenge. No one built any plans for how she could use her skills somewhere else to assist the firm.

Confronted with what amounted to a huge demotion, she resisted the job. Provided her expertise, she was capable to stage out the techniques that the challenge would present much less useful information and facts than her highly-customized handbook method, and experienced the assistance of the executives who now experienced what they needed.

Finally somebody came to their senses, assisted her transition to a part additional adapted to her information competencies, and created absolutely sure that the IT staff labored closely with her to produce an even better outcome for the executives.

These “culture blindness” is typically at the coronary heart of failed technology assignments. To a little bit misquote Upton Sinclair: “It is hard to get any individual to have an understanding of some thing, when their salary depends on them not understanding it.” In this circumstance, it applies to the assistant, but also to the IT workers that, possibly unconsciously, underinvested in all that “human stuff” — these as achieving out to the men and women executing it these days — simply because it would “get in the way” of providing the project…