The System Knows

Yesterday, a woman in Wisconsin religiously relying on her GPS ended up driving on a snowmobile trail. Several miles down the frozen path, she got herself stuck in two feet of snow. It took the Police a while to figure out where she was in the first place, and then to bring heavy equipment and free her vehicle.

You might be saying to yourself how dumb does a person need to be to do what this woman did? In reality, while not many people would do that (except for Michael and Dwight in one of the Office’s episodes), many businesses are acting exactly like this woman. I see it everyday where business leaders stop looking at the big picture and start relying on “the system”. I worked with this head of sales who kept repeating “the system” should do this and “the system” should do that to the point where he deeply believed that “the system” could actually manage the entire sale process for him.

Well, every system is another tool in your toolbox, it definitely helps decision-making but it will not build things for you by itself. At the beginning of every project, I always make sure the stakeholders understand that the business is driving decision-making and not IT. Any IT solution that we recommend is the outcome of a business need and not the other way around.