Category Archives: Technology

Bad system, good people

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Sometimes, it doesn’t matter how people work or how they use a system, its just bad. Bad in terms of an unintuitive user experience (user interaction flows) or terrible functionality fit, slow or compromised performance, poor security, inadequate integration, unscalable architecture or a combination thereof.

Unfortunately, quite often companies continue to compound the errors made by previous generations of management and old decisions. More money, more fix-it projects and the businesspeople using the system in question continue to get pressured. The typical justification is that doing a “rip and replace” job is going to be terribly expensive, a huge effort in transition and change management and a significant risk in terms of business disruption.

A lot of this used to be true, till about a decade ago. Now, there are choices that make things different. The development of SOA, composite applications, SaaS, ITO/ BPO and BYOD complicate the IT environment, but completely change the dialogue in the situation above. There is even more reason now to do a quick application lifetime cost assessment along with a  business benefits review accompanied by an ROI analysis that connects the dots. It is pretty compelling when alternate scenarios are defined and the implications spelled out in dollar terms.

Is this your situation? Things could change really quickly if you open the door to these possibilities. Let the businesspeople go free to generate revenue and drive growth!

On the evaluation and selection of technologies

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An executive asked me once, please would  you provide to us the guiding principles and framework that assisted in the most successful decisions in the evaluation and selection of technologies (across a wide range of enterprise enabling technologies – personal productivity, desktop environment, business apps from BI to ERPs and beyond, networking, security, infrastructure etc). After a long presentation where we walked through a multi-dimensional, multi-parameter framework that allowed for evaluation and rating of technologies on an array of aspects (macro-level parameters such as market outlook, vendor longevity and financial performance, positioning on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant; micro-parameters such as feature and functionality, resource availability, performance in the company’s industry segment et al), the team of twenty executives and managers seemed to be divided into two groups. One set of people wanted to know more details – parameter definitions, information availability, how to scope and score, the ratings and how sensitive they were. The other set of people (smaller group) sat back and asked about the objectivity of the ratings, since these would finally be assigned by people (ranging from “experts” and “super-users”, to “informed users” and just regular business process owners). Both perspectives are important and have their place in the process of evaluation and selection of technologies.

But in the overall scheme of things, the selection and decision-making of technologies in the enterprise context is an emotional decision. Or one that involves emotions including past association, history of success/ familiarity and other (external) aspects of business including potential balance of trade with the vendors in question. People, the sooner we acknowledge these dynamics (often taking place behind the scenes) and factor them into the process, the easier it will be to get beyond the pseudo-science and into the guts of the evaluation readout. Decision-making will be more acceptable and will cause less dissonance if adequate visibility is provided!