Try understanding the problem BEFORE solving it
Great article - very insightful. I'm a bit disappointed in myself for needing to have this explained to me. I do have a small bit of relevant experience in a similar area.
I was tasked with obtaining a LIMS (laboratory information management system) for the lab I worked at in the dim and distant past. As part of my education, I attended a dog and pony show for one of the leading providers. In my mind, this was still early days for LIMS products, but the first thing the speaker did was to ask the audience to show hands whether this was the first LIMS their companies had bought. It turned out that there were already folks looking for a fourth LIMS system.
I am far from a management expert, but even I realized immediately that if you had already failed three times at trying to make one of these products benefit your company, there might well be a systematic failure in that organization that needed to be addressed first.
When it was time for actual implementation of a product for us, I was struck by the fact that no one wanted to do the work of figuring our IN DETAIL how our internal processes actually worked, and in the cases where I did get some cooperation, no one seemed to understand that the only things the system could do for us were the ones we told it about - if we only did something once in a while, we could never do it at all, unless we also explained how and when to do that do the new system.
I'm surprised any of these things work, at all. You're absolutely right - many if not most of the failures come down to management failing to understand the problem first.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
