I mentioned in a recent post that I was re-reading Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm. The thought occurred to me while reading Moore's description of the Laggards in the product life-cycle that in many cases, the Laggards have it right. To quote Mr. Moore, "One of the favorite arguments of skeptics is that the billions of dollars invested in office automation have not improved the productivity of the office place one Iota. Actually, some fairly good data exist to support this notion".
While Moore discusses ways to rebut this line of argument, I would suggest one of my favorite points: Technology is only as good as the processes that it supports. I would rather be operating a company that had rock-solid processes implemented through mediocre technology, rather than dysfunctional processes with state-of-the-art technology.
I've seen too many cases of companies trying to solve problems by throwing technology at them.
One of the most hilarious examples of this that I can recall was when I was with a software firm producing a product for the behavioral health market. At that time, many community mental health organizations were facing significant changes in their business practices brought on by managed care and revenue capitation. One of the issues that they were struggling with, and that they repeatedly were demanding their practice management software to solve for them was the issue of services "incurred but not reported". Basically, the problem was that they had clinicians that would perform services, but fail to report those services in a timely fashion, so that the organization could account for the financial liability for those services having been rendered.
Here was a perfect example of a broken process within these organizations (they couldn't get their clinicians to report the services they were providing to clients), so these organizations were trying to find some technology - from us or any of our competitors - that would fix this broken process. As technologists, we could come up with all kinds of different mechanisms to collect the data. But short of implanting RFID chips into all of their clients, they would all require some user action to actually record the service event, and the phenomenon of "incurred but not reported" could still occur.
So the Laggards' skepticism is often right on the mark, but the fault doesn't always lie solely with the purveyors of the technology. It isn't the technology that is lacking, it's the proper implementation of the technology within the framework of the business. The challenge for us, if we're responsible for implementing a technology solution (whether on the business side, or the technology side), is to ensure that what we're accomplishing is really making things better rather than just making impressive rows of blinking lights.