| Culture Eats Technology For Breakfast

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

All way too generally I see assignments failing not for the reason that the technologies are not working, but since not more than enough consideration has been paid out to the folks currently being displaced.

For case in point, many a long time back an government dashboard project was really almost derailed by 1 of the executive assistants. The dashboard was designed to change and automate several several hours of guide work that the assistant had been carrying out for years.

The IT group naively overlooked the implications for the assistant herself. She was not thanked for all the hard function that she experienced been accomplishing, that was essential for the managing of the organization. Even with her deep skills in what knowledge was demanded, what challenges there ended up with the info sources, and so forth., she was not integrated in the venture. Nobody manufactured any plans for how she could use her skills elsewhere to enable the corporation.

Faced with what amounted to a huge demotion, she resisted the project. Specified her skills, she was ready to position out the approaches that the project would supply less valuable info than her really-custom-made guide process, and had the assistance of the executives who now had what they wanted.

Ultimately anyone came to their senses, served her transition to a position extra adapted to her data expertise, and made positive that the IT group labored carefully with her to supply an even better consequence for the executives.

These “culture blindness” is normally at the heart of failed technology tasks. To somewhat misquote Upton Sinclair: “It is hard to get someone to understand something, when their wage is dependent on them not being familiar with it.” In this case, it applies to the assistant, but also to the IT workers that, perhaps unconsciously, underinvested in all that “human stuff” — such as achieving out to the individuals executing it right now — because it would “get in the way” of providing the project…