In Another Technology Life...
I've been in the technology sector, in one form or another, for over 20 years. Early in my career I was fortunate enough to join a cutting edge organization called International Road Dynamics (IRD). IRD was in early stages of commercialization their world class Intelligent Transportation Systems. I was much younger and hadn't realized until recently that what we were doing was "in-field research". I treated every situation with the greatest of customer service care completely oblivious to the fact the systems we were implementing were bleeding edge and not fully commercial-ready. Despite the "road bumps" we were able to improve the products while delivering better insight into how highways needed to be engineered and maintained. It was a complicated array of variables that went into highway design for the purpose of maximizing the life of a jurisdictions' infrastructure investments.
This work was highly rewarding because of a team of great people that were able to research and develop products at a fast pace while continually improving the customer experience. These systems were critical for gathering the information required to ensure highway departments around the world were maximizing the value of highway infrastructure investments. To this day I look at this work as the most rewarding and satisfying of my career.
Today's Environment
In reflecting on the early days of my career I am reminded of the importance of why we create products and solutions. Despite the technological advances in information technology what seems to be continually lost on far too many organizations is purpose. The questions that continue to pop into my head on web platform projects include:
- Why are we building websites?
- What are we trying to achieve by investing in a web platform (i.e. SharePoint)?
- What ongoing improvements will deliver the maximum value to information workers?
- What is required to support solutions and associated systems?
- How will what we're proposing align with business/organizational goals?
It is surprising to me, given my early experiences with technology and business goals, how the creation of an "industry" (information technology) has too often excluded the "why" from the equation. We have an entire ecosystem of technology partners that propose products before solutions. They sell to IT departments often without having a single conversation with the business users who will ultimately use the solution. As with most bureaucracies, the "siloing" of departments within an organization has drastically hampered the ability to understand and deliver on "the why". I have personally witnessed, on two occasions this year, larger organizations make purchasing decisions solely on the price of a product/service. They completely dismissed approaching the solution more methodically and from a business/technology balanced approach. It's purely a developer-cost issue in their minds and the thinking has much to do with how technology is sold. By a product and your problems are solved.
Technology products, by themselves, do not solve problems; people do. It is critical to get the technology design correct but it is equally, or likely more critical to get the business problems solved and to make systems "usable". Business problems are not solved because you happen to love SharePoint and have created all the widgets a customer will ever need. There has to be purpose, a reason, a WHY.
All is not lost
The fortunate part of being in the business of creative solutions is that there are a lot of smart people out there that understand the issues and are open-minded enough to consider change. What needs to happen is communications with technology experts on why solving organizational challenges is priority one. I would also suggest that addressing challenges is neither primarily about strategic planning nor effective solution building; it about getting things done right and ensuring there is always a focus on why. Focusing only on technology creates other problems which manifest themselves in several ways:
- No measurable improvements to business problems have been realized
- Solutions are not broadly adopted or completely thrown away
- There are constant reworks of the solution because expectations have not been met
- Hammer and Nail Syndrome: All problems are being "solved" with one technology
IRD was an organization that captured the spirit of "Why" more effectively than their competition. It is for this reason that today they are a world leader in their industry. The path was not perfect with many bumps along the road to success. However, I never perceived a marriage to any one way of doing things; a cult of technology, and more importantly neither did their clients. There were problems to solve and issues to address in order to keep traffic flowing and maintain the longevity of highway systems. This is precisely how IT departments should think not only about their customers, the information workers, but also their business/tecbnology partners they hire to help create the solutions. Too often these relationships are adversarial for so many reasons that it requires another blog to cover.
In an ideal scenario creating great business solutions is a combination of IT, business, and communications people (the TEAM), all working together to build world class solutions that solve problems. There is no value in building a great looking solution with clever coding that goes unused. If you think you're already there ask yourself if your organization is "landing on Mars" or "contemplating the moon". Too many organizations are still stuck with ineffective Intranets or, worse, complicated and messy file shares.
What do you think? Does your organization over-indulge in technology or does it maintain a balance with business? Is the usability a solutions a focus? I would love to hear your thoughts.
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