| Culture Eats Technology For Breakfast

A fast Friday reminder that we have to aim on what is important, even with all the every day complexities and troubles of know-how!…

All too usually I see assignments failing not because the systems aren’t operating, but because not enough consideration has been paid out to the men and women staying displaced.

For case in point, various decades back an govt dashboard challenge was quite just about derailed by 1 of the govt assistants. The dashboard was intended to change and automate quite a few several hours of guide get the job done that the assistant experienced been carrying out for years.

The IT staff naively dismissed the implications for the assistant herself. She was not thanked for all the tough function that she had been executing, that was important for the functioning of the firm. Irrespective of her deep abilities in what info was expected, what issues there were being with the info sources, etcetera., she was not integrated in the undertaking. Nobody made any designs for how she could use her abilities in other places to aid the enterprise.

Confronted with what amounted to a big demotion, she resisted the challenge. Presented her skills, she was equipped to place out the ways that the project would present significantly less valuable details than her hugely-personalized handbook process, and had the help of the executives who currently experienced what they preferred.

Inevitably somebody came to their senses, aided her changeover to a job more adapted to her information abilities, and manufactured confident that the IT staff worked carefully with her to produce an even much better result for the executives.

This kind of “culture blindness” is often at the heart of failed engineering assignments. To marginally misquote Upton Sinclair: “It is tough to get any individual to fully grasp anything, when their wage depends on them not knowledge it.” In this case, it applies to the assistant, but also to the IT staff members that, possibly unconsciously, underinvested in all that “human stuff” — these kinds of as achieving out to the persons accomplishing it today — due to the fact it would “get in the way” of offering the project…