For this post the use of IT (information technology) includes software and hardware.
Key areas of resistance:
- Human nature factors: fear, laziness, resistance to change.
- Organisational: lack of resources to provide, lack of awareness, inability to train, too busy – and all human nature factors.
I can ‘unpack’ some of the above but I won’t. Why? Cuz I’m not paid to give an academic lecture on this out here!
So, what’s my motivation for this post? I came up on an issue where ‘an organisation’ needs to schedule meetings for groups of ‘x’ people across several locations. What they have always done is send out an Excel spreadsheet to attendees with allocations. Well, the obvious problem with that – as a statistical probability – was that ‘a person’ may not have received, or seen or opened the email – for ‘n’ number of reasons.
I proposed a system using Microsoft Outlook where invitations could be sent out by email, confirmations received automatically in Outlook Calendar and then reminders at say 4 – 6 weeks prior to the meeting are sent. That wasn’t ‘workable’ for some reasons that connect with the areas of ‘resistance’ above. The response to my proposal basically referred to overwork and complexity. The response showed a lack of understanding of how the software would work. In fact individuals had no time to consider how the software would work. Why? Cuz they’re all running around like headless chickens, driven by their superiors to take on more important tasks. So what that means is that they don’t have time to save time.
So now, in order to bring about ‘change’ I’d have to educate that person on how the software works – and they just don’t have time for that, nor will their employer provide time for any of it. This becomes ‘the wall’.
What happens next?
- They’ll continue with an inefficient time consuming system.
- They’ll continue to waste time.
- They may change in 20 years, when some big bod from up at the top sends a directive to change.
Look, this is just the way of ‘The Empire’. I’m not here to change ‘no Empire’. I need to keep in mind always that I’m actually nobody!
