IT and Productivity

Thinking Faster has some thoughts on why technology doesn’t make business as productive as it should be. Some snippets (But read the whole thing!):

“I have been in the bowels of the beast, and I think I can say fairly definitively that very few people receive the information they need from the systems they have. There are several reasons for that result. Surprisingly, few of them are the fault of the IT organization.”

“Trying to pin down business people on exactly what data they want and how they’ll use it is virtually impossible.” (Been there, done that!)

“most business people treat IT as if it were a mystery and don’t try to understand how technology works. I think that this is because traditionally IT was treated as a holy art that only the sanctified few could truly understand. ”

“What reinforces this problem is that IT people still hold mass in Latin – or, more to the point, tend to talk in three and four letter acronyms and argue about the benefits of Java or .NET.”

It’s an interesting look at how each side of the fence looks at technology and I’d have to say, as someone who spent a number of years working in accounting and finance before going to work in IT, I agree with a lot of it!

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