| Culture Eats Technology For Breakfast

A swift Friday reminder that we have to aim on what’s crucial, inspite of all the daily complexities and issues of technology!…

All much too typically I see initiatives failing not since the systems are not working, but since not sufficient focus has been compensated to the individuals being displaced.

For case in point, many decades ago an government dashboard venture was incredibly just about derailed by a single of the government assistants. The dashboard was developed to change and automate many hours of guide do the job that the assistant experienced been carrying out for decades.

The IT crew naively ignored the implications for the assistant herself. She wasn’t thanked for all the really hard do the job that she experienced been performing, that was crucial for the operating of the organization. Regardless of her deep abilities in what knowledge was essential, what challenges there have been with the info sources, etc., she wasn’t integrated in the job. No one produced any ideas for how she could use her skills in other places to help the corporation.

Confronted with what amounted to a huge demotion, she resisted the project. Specified her skills, she was in a position to level out the techniques that the venture would give less important facts than her hugely-custom-made manual process, and experienced the assist of the executives who presently had what they desired.

Inevitably any person came to their senses, assisted her transition to a part far more adapted to her facts abilities, and created sure that the IT workforce worked closely with her to supply an even far better end result for the executives.

This sort of “culture blindness” is normally at the coronary heart of unsuccessful technological innovation projects. To slightly misquote Upton Sinclair: “It is complicated to get someone to comprehend something, when their income depends on them not knowledge it.” In this circumstance, it applies to the assistant, but also to the IT employees that, perhaps unconsciously, underinvested in all that “human stuff” — these kinds of as reaching out to the men and women doing it now — mainly because it would “get in the way” of providing the project…