Back to the future
Every day I seem to get linked and connected to the various wise gurus talking about technology. What's in, what's out, what's new, what's now legacy and of course the compulsory criticism of whatever is in place and whoever put it there. There seems to now be an industry of writers who all know what is wrong and what is right.
I am firmly in the IT is a tool camp. It is there to do something. What I see today is that it has become bling. It is no longer there to achieve something, the focus seems to be all about the IT and not about the outcomes. It seems to matter little what the IT is trying to achieve and more about how it is achieving it. This inevitably leads to the arms race of the how.
Looking back we see the client server revolution, WWW, then we started to see web services, Enterprise Architecture, SOA, Web 2.0, virtualisation and now of course Cloud. All fully marketed, all set to change the world, all set to reduce costs, improve productivity blah blah blah.
But go back in time thousands of years and give a caveman a new cloud based email solution via a smart phone. Will he catch more wildebeest? Nope. He will simply use the smart phone to beat his next meal to death with, and even then the tool would be the wrong tool.
How many more cavemen do we have to give these tools to before we realise that unless there is a use for them then they will simply be the wrong tool in the wrong hands and used for the wrong job. Trouble is, the snake oil salesman from the IT world do somehow manage to convince caveman that it is the right tool for the job leaving poor old caveman hungry and confused as to why it now takes an hour to beat to death his rabbit dinner instead of 1 blow with his old tool the rock. And now he has to share any lunch he does manage to catch.
One can take these analogies too far, and I often do.
So why do we do this to ourselves. Well, poor old caveman does not know any better. We all know that before caveman can use his smartphone he will need some cultural change. He could use the smart phone to learn about farming, predict the weather, learn about health and treatment of sickness. He could use it to learn how to trap animals instead of chase them. The outcome he would be aiming for is a healthier environment to bring up his family with lower risk of death and an improved source of food.
But to even achieve that, caveman would need to understand how his world could be transformed and there would need to be a desire to do this. Even this understanding needs to be doen through education.
And this is where I think IT is today. Yes, its easy to pick a few examples out there where IT has transformed and visions are in place and culture has changed. But it is only in a small set of highly over publicised cases.
The emphasis has to move away from the tool. Yes, we need to keep modernising and innovating our tools but when the actual modernising of the tool becomes the outcome and not the transformation the modern tools should bring then what we see is a highly costly change of tool sets with little or no return on that investment.
I am firmly in the IT is a tool camp. It is there to do something. What I see today is that it has become bling. It is no longer there to achieve something, the focus seems to be all about the IT and not about the outcomes. It seems to matter little what the IT is trying to achieve and more about how it is achieving it. This inevitably leads to the arms race of the how.
Looking back we see the client server revolution, WWW, then we started to see web services, Enterprise Architecture, SOA, Web 2.0, virtualisation and now of course Cloud. All fully marketed, all set to change the world, all set to reduce costs, improve productivity blah blah blah.
But go back in time thousands of years and give a caveman a new cloud based email solution via a smart phone. Will he catch more wildebeest? Nope. He will simply use the smart phone to beat his next meal to death with, and even then the tool would be the wrong tool.
How many more cavemen do we have to give these tools to before we realise that unless there is a use for them then they will simply be the wrong tool in the wrong hands and used for the wrong job. Trouble is, the snake oil salesman from the IT world do somehow manage to convince caveman that it is the right tool for the job leaving poor old caveman hungry and confused as to why it now takes an hour to beat to death his rabbit dinner instead of 1 blow with his old tool the rock. And now he has to share any lunch he does manage to catch.
One can take these analogies too far, and I often do.
So why do we do this to ourselves. Well, poor old caveman does not know any better. We all know that before caveman can use his smartphone he will need some cultural change. He could use the smart phone to learn about farming, predict the weather, learn about health and treatment of sickness. He could use it to learn how to trap animals instead of chase them. The outcome he would be aiming for is a healthier environment to bring up his family with lower risk of death and an improved source of food.
But to even achieve that, caveman would need to understand how his world could be transformed and there would need to be a desire to do this. Even this understanding needs to be doen through education.
And this is where I think IT is today. Yes, its easy to pick a few examples out there where IT has transformed and visions are in place and culture has changed. But it is only in a small set of highly over publicised cases.
The emphasis has to move away from the tool. Yes, we need to keep modernising and innovating our tools but when the actual modernising of the tool becomes the outcome and not the transformation the modern tools should bring then what we see is a highly costly change of tool sets with little or no return on that investment.
posted by So long and thanks for all the fish at
11:09 am
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