Technology without Process – Again

Time for a bit of a rant.

Why won’t technology people learn that technology achieves – NOTHING unless it is accompanied by a process change. One of the reasons that personal computing is so powerful is that it enables people to change there own process without too much impact on other people. When it comes to collaboration technologies though, this all gets blown out of the water. It is absolutely essential that members of the team understand how they are going to collaborate. Having a collaboration space achieves – NOTHING.

Yesterday I read how Marc Orchant’s organisation had taken a whole set of state of the art processes and practices and applied them to a number of things which they had decided were broken (presentation, meetings, email, etc.). It’s about process, not about technology. The technology gives them something which they need to control having the process allows them to gain the value. Now that’s the right way to do it .

Today I am involved in a project where they have decide to create a collaboration space without any agreed process or even purpose. This collaboration space is delivering absolutely no value and is unlikely to get used until we give it a purpose; a process; a practice. What makes this one even worse is that the lack of process has lead to a choice of technology configuration which is sub-optimal at best, and in some instances is non-existent .

The link of process and technology is such an old issue it’s frightening. I have certainly known it for nearly 20 years and yet as an industry we ignore it time and time and time again. Perhaps we don’t learn from our history .