| Culture Eats Technology For Breakfast

A swift Friday reminder that we have to target on what is critical, despite all the day-to-day complexities and troubles of technology!…

All also usually I see assignments failing not due to the fact the technologies aren’t operating, but since not ample awareness has been paid out to the persons staying displaced.

For example, quite a few many years ago an executive dashboard project was incredibly nearly derailed by a single of the govt assistants. The dashboard was designed to swap and automate quite a few hours of handbook function that the assistant had been carrying out for many years.

The IT team naively ignored the implications for the assistant herself. She was not thanked for all the challenging perform that she experienced been carrying out, that was essential for the running of the firm. Regardless of her deep experience in what data was essential, what challenges there have been with the knowledge resources, etc., she was not involved in the undertaking. No one made any options for how she could use her knowledge elsewhere to assistance the organization.

Confronted with what amounted to a big demotion, she resisted the job. Supplied her experience, she was equipped to issue out the strategies that the task would provide a lot less valuable info than her highly-tailored guide system, and had the help of the executives who now experienced what they wished.

At some point somebody came to their senses, assisted her changeover to a function more adapted to her knowledge abilities, and built absolutely sure that the IT workforce worked carefully with her to supply an even far better result for the executives.

Such “culture blindness” is normally at the coronary heart of failed technology tasks. To a little misquote Upton Sinclair: “It is tricky to get somebody to realize some thing, when their salary is dependent on them not comprehending it.” In this scenario, it applies to the assistant, but also to the IT employees that, most likely unconsciously, underinvested in all that “human stuff” — this kind of as achieving out to the people today accomplishing it nowadays — for the reason that it would “get in the way” of providing the project…