Culture Eats Technology For Breakfast – Digital Business & Business Analytics

A fast Friday reminder that we have to concentration on what is critical, regardless of all the everyday complexities and problems of know-how!…

All much too often I see initiatives failing not for the reason that the technologies aren’t performing, but for the reason that not ample notice has been paid to the individuals staying displaced.

For illustration, many several years back an govt dashboard venture was pretty virtually derailed by one particular of the executive assistants. The dashboard was designed to replace and automate a lot of hours of guide get the job done that the assistant had been carrying out for yrs.

The IT team naively ignored the implications for the assistant herself. She wasn’t thanked for all the difficult function that she had been performing, that was crucial for the jogging of the company. Irrespective of her deep experience in what knowledge was required, what difficulties there were with the information sources, and many others., she was not included in the job. No one designed any options for how she could use her knowledge somewhere else to assistance the corporation.

Confronted with what amounted to a significant demotion, she resisted the challenge. Provided her know-how, she was able to stage out the means that the job would deliver considerably less valuable details than her very-custom-made manual process, and had the help of the executives who previously had what they wanted.

Eventually any person arrived to their senses, served her transition to a position much more adapted to her data expertise, and produced positive that the IT team worked carefully with her to produce an even improved final result for the executives.

These types of “culture blindness” is frequently at the heart of unsuccessful technological innovation projects. To a little misquote Upton Sinclair: “It is tough to get any person to realize a little something, when their salary is dependent on them not understanding it.” In this scenario, it applies to the assistant, but also to the IT staff that, maybe unconsciously, underinvested in all that “human stuff” — this sort of as achieving out to the people doing it today — mainly because it would “get in the way” of providing the project…