Broken Promise – The Hope of Information Technology Turns into False Hope
- September 12th, 2010
- Posted in Systems Thinking and Technology
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The story is the same that I have heard played many times. Information technology to the rescue. We were expecting Ironman and instead got Underdog or Homer Simpson. The broken promise of IT and the carnage left behind can only leave one shaking their head in disbelief.
Yet, organizations both private and public keep believing that this time will be the magic answer. Modernization is our future and may careers are at stake so let’s go to the well one more time.
Maybe a different path would be more appropriate.
Information technology has followed the same path as faulty operational thinking. You can’t hear the machines running like in manufacturing, but the brains still follow scientific management methods in hope that we can create the economic glory of early post-WWII America.
Where information technology had great promise we now have instead software developers buried behind business analysts and project managers. Only to find that we now plan to miss dates and make the customer worse.
Mind-boggling, as IT continues to carry a false bravado that only an executive from Enron, WorldCom and Tyco could pull off. The salespeople sell the sizzle . . . because there ain’t no steak.
In fairness, the organizations are dysfunctional too, but we lock in the waste with information technology. Workflow where the work already doesn’t flow, so let’s automate the poor work design . . . that’ll fix it! Management gets piles of reports with data and now we have to (data) mine it for the best of the nuggets of information. More technology sold with little value.
Until organizations begin to understand that improving the work BEFORE information technology is introduced the redundancy of failure is sure to continue. AND when we quit hiring loads of non-value IT positions that keep software developers away from the work, we may have hope. Unfortunately, we will be left with the same management thinking that built the work design and IT in the first place.
Where do we go from here? A better thinking path that promotes information technology in a supporting role would be a beginning. Redesigning the work to optimize the system BEFORE technology would be a good start. Regardless, seems any path is better than the present.
Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion! Click on comments below.
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Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.
Tripp,
It is so easy to throw stones at IT people. Businesses ask a lot.
I’d like you to explain what you mean by “non-value IT positions that keep software developers away from the work”
First the software developer has to be an expert detail focused techie who takes directions. Then they need to be IT guys that talk to people and understand what they are not saying but really mean. Those are two behaviousrs at the opposite ends of the personality prefernce scales: it is rare people that can be both.
Then the users they must talk to are probably ingrained in “this is the way we do it here” without understanding why (thank you to “Just do it” and “Can Do attitude” managers). They can’t see if the constraints are real or “just the way we do it here (because that is the way Nellie taught us)”.
The managers, of course, want the projects done as cheap and fast as possible with as little disruption (time spent with the users) to normal work as possible. Can they fit the IT Guy into their schedule to explain? Probably not in the time needed. Will they pay top dollar for good people who work twice as fast to better quality? No.
Most IT people want to do a great job. They love the potential for the technology to make things better. They want to make the system they are building deliver the benefits. Why are projects such a problem? A recurring explaination is “We’d be fine if only the users could explain what they want!” or “we delivered what the boss told us but now they say we got it wrong”.
(A longer version will be on my blog at 3triangles.co.uk in a few hours.)
It isn’t IT – it is the system they work in. Rather than critise, systems thinkers need to focus on helping managers and IT guys see this as a part of a failing system and what they all need to do to make it work.
In the words of Mary Poppins, “I never explain myself.” Except when I do.
Managers, business analysts and project managers don’t do the value work. They can support it, but they don’t do it.
Developers can be more successful by working with those that use the application to enable rather than entrap the work. If we need interpretors, something is lost in the transaction.
In the current environment of command and control, you are correct. Users don’t know what they want. A systems thinking organization is clear on purpose and how to enable the work to achieve it. So, it may sound like a shot at just IT, but it is really a shot at the waste of our thinking about the design and management of work.
Being critical makes people think, we disturb their normal patterns of thinking. The curious will seek and the rest will live in an environment of waste and mediocrity.