Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Business/IT Alignment and Chronic Procrastination...
I had an interesting conversation with a highly respected architect on why IT continues to mislead the business...
Have you ever considered for a moment that the story of IT as told by non-technical ITleadershipmanagement is at the root cause of IT failure? Consider for a moment that you worked with this executive to put together an ardous chock-a-block eye candy Powerpoint presentation so that they can do a dog-and-pony show pitch to the business. Of course this pitch is being done by lots of folks who don't really understand the details of technology yet believe in perception management and want folks to think they know what is really going on, so they choose to make up an answer on the fly.
Have you noticed that Indian outsourcing firms want you to sign off on requirements and use-cases upfront without acknowledging that you can't possibly digest the phone book sized requirements and are still shell shocked by the thud factor of all that documentation that nobody really reads?
Maybe the root cause of IT failure is chronic procrastination. The IT executive procrastinates in terms of actually learning what IT is all about and instead falls back on cliche phrases by constantly repeating how the company is conservative, you can't turn a big ship quick and so on.
Everybody procrastinates to some degree. A chronic procrastinator does it all the time and can't seem to control it. Some time management techniques that work for the average procrastinator either don't work well, or sometimes backfire when a chronic procrastinator tries to use them. Example, a chronic procrastinator may overdo a to do List to the point that the list seems to make the problem bigger than it really is, causing further procrastination.
Usually procrastination is strongly coupled to attention deficit disorders which is an affliction shared by up to an estimated 5% of the population and is characterized by the inability to focus on a task. Can your boss focus on a task for more than 1/2 hour? If not, maybe he isn't the solution, but the problem...
| | View blog reactionsHave you ever considered for a moment that the story of IT as told by non-technical IT
Have you noticed that Indian outsourcing firms want you to sign off on requirements and use-cases upfront without acknowledging that you can't possibly digest the phone book sized requirements and are still shell shocked by the thud factor of all that documentation that nobody really reads?
Maybe the root cause of IT failure is chronic procrastination. The IT executive procrastinates in terms of actually learning what IT is all about and instead falls back on cliche phrases by constantly repeating how the company is conservative, you can't turn a big ship quick and so on.
Everybody procrastinates to some degree. A chronic procrastinator does it all the time and can't seem to control it. Some time management techniques that work for the average procrastinator either don't work well, or sometimes backfire when a chronic procrastinator tries to use them. Example, a chronic procrastinator may overdo a to do List to the point that the list seems to make the problem bigger than it really is, causing further procrastination.
Usually procrastination is strongly coupled to attention deficit disorders which is an affliction shared by up to an estimated 5% of the population and is characterized by the inability to focus on a task. Can your boss focus on a task for more than 1/2 hour? If not, maybe he isn't the solution, but the problem...
