| Culture Eats Technology For Breakfast

A swift Friday reminder that we have to focus on what is vital, in spite of all the every day complexities and issues of technologies!…

All way too frequently I see initiatives failing not because the technologies are not performing, but since not enough notice has been paid to the men and women getting displaced.

For example, quite a few several years ago an govt dashboard venture was pretty practically derailed by 1 of the government assistants. The dashboard was developed to replace and automate many hours of guide function that the assistant had been carrying out for yrs.

The IT workforce naively dismissed the implications for the assistant herself. She was not thanked for all the tricky operate that she had been doing, that was important for the running of the enterprise. Inspite of her deep experience in what knowledge was essential, what issues there have been with the knowledge sources, and many others., she was not integrated in the challenge. No person manufactured any programs for how she could use her knowledge somewhere else to aid the business.

Faced with what amounted to a massive demotion, she resisted the project. Provided her experience, she was able to level out the approaches that the challenge would deliver considerably less useful information than her hugely-custom made manual method, and had the guidance of the executives who now had what they wished.

Ultimately any person came to their senses, served her transition to a purpose far more tailored to her info abilities, and produced sure that the IT staff worked carefully with her to deliver an even much better consequence for the executives.

These “culture blindness” is frequently at the coronary heart of failed know-how assignments. To a little bit misquote Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get somebody to fully grasp a thing, when their wage relies upon on them not comprehending it.” In this circumstance, it applies to the assistant, but also to the IT staff members that, most likely unconsciously, underinvested in all that “human stuff” — this kind of as reaching out to the people performing it currently — because it would “get in the way” of providing the project…