| Culture Eats Technology For Breakfast

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A swift Friday reminder that we have to aim on what’s significant, irrespective of all the day-to-day complexities and troubles of technological know-how!…

All too often I see jobs failing not mainly because the technologies are not working, but because not adequate interest has been paid to the folks being displaced.

For case in point, numerous many years in the past an government dashboard venture was very nearly derailed by one particular of the govt assistants. The dashboard was developed to replace and automate several several hours of manual perform that the assistant experienced been carrying out for yrs.

The IT team naively dismissed the implications for the assistant herself. She was not thanked for all the challenging work that she experienced been undertaking, that was crucial for the jogging of the organization. Even with her deep expertise in what knowledge was expected, what troubles there had been with the details resources, and so on., she was not bundled in the job. Nobody produced any strategies for how she could use her experience somewhere else to assist the corporation.

Faced with what amounted to a big demotion, she resisted the venture. Given her expertise, she was in a position to issue out the means that the challenge would provide less important data than her hugely-custom-made manual system, and had the guidance of the executives who previously had what they needed.

Sooner or later any person arrived to their senses, aided her transition to a part extra adapted to her knowledge skills, and designed positive that the IT group labored closely with her to supply an even greater result for the executives.

This kind of “culture blindness” is frequently at the coronary heart of unsuccessful technological innovation jobs. To somewhat misquote Upton Sinclair: “It is tough to get anyone to realize something, when their income is dependent on them not comprehending it.” In this scenario, it applies to the assistant, but also to the IT team that, probably unconsciously, underinvested in all that “human stuff” — these kinds of as achieving out to the people today executing it nowadays — for the reason that it would “get in the way” of delivering the project…

 

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