| Culture Eats Technology For Breakfast

A brief Friday reminder that we have to emphasis on what is essential, in spite of all the every day complexities and problems of technological innovation!…

All too normally I see tasks failing not because the systems aren’t functioning, but for the reason that not adequate attention has been paid out to the folks remaining displaced.

For example, several decades in the past an govt dashboard task was pretty nearly derailed by 1 of the executive assistants. The dashboard was made to substitute and automate numerous hrs of handbook work that the assistant experienced been carrying out for decades.

The IT workforce naively disregarded the implications for the assistant herself. She was not thanked for all the hard perform that she had been executing, that was critical for the functioning of the company. Even with her deep know-how in what knowledge was necessary, what troubles there were being with the details resources, and so forth., she wasn’t provided in the challenge. No one built any plans for how she could use her know-how somewhere else to help the company.

Confronted with what amounted to a large demotion, she resisted the challenge. Provided her skills, she was able to issue out the approaches that the job would provide significantly less beneficial data than her hugely-customized guide course of action, and experienced the aid of the executives who currently had what they wished.

Finally any person arrived to their senses, assisted her transition to a purpose much more adapted to her knowledge techniques, and created confident that the IT staff labored intently with her to produce an even much better result for the executives.

These kinds of “culture blindness” is often at the heart of unsuccessful technology assignments. To somewhat misquote Upton Sinclair: “It is tough to get somebody to recognize a thing, when their salary relies upon on them not comprehending it.” In this scenario, it applies to the assistant, but also to the IT employees that, perhaps unconsciously, underinvested in all that “human stuff” — these types of as achieving out to the persons executing it nowadays — due to the fact it would “get in the way” of offering the project…