Technology Immortalizes Bad Practices

For all the benefits that technology can bring to an organization that adopts it to automate tasks, it has a smothering effect on innovation.  This likely elicits a incredulous "harrumph" from those who are of the opinion that technology alone is innovation - but there's a good case that it isn't, and that it is most often used to ensconce bad practices and prevent companies from being innovative.

Consider first that technology is used to replace processes without changing them in any significant way.   At the onset, a paper-based system of storing and managing  information was automated by technology, but the fundamental process by which the information was collected, organized, and accessed was carried over rather than reconsidered in light of the different, and in most cases superior, capabilities of technology.  

Has it never struck you as slightly idiotic that personal computers still mimic the artifacts of the ink-and-paper world?   Why is it that a word-processing file is represented by an icon that looks like a typewritten letter?   Why should data be stored in spreadsheets that look suspiciously like paper ledgers and graphical representations of database records look like 3-by-5 index cards or paper forms?   Why should "files" be stored in "folders" and the icon for a file server look suspiciously like a filing cabinet?

Certainly, when the graphical user interface first appeared on personal computers in 1984, it could be argued that representing computer files as if they were paper files was a friendly paradigm for office workers who felt reluctant to adopt the new technology.  But nearly thirty years later, we're still locked in a paradigm that content is stored in documents that must still be treated in the same way as paper artifacts that fewer people in each generation of workers have a memory of ever handling, which prevents us from even considering information in any other way.

It's a pernicious problem on a larger scale, when you consider that in order to make and pay for a purchase, you must still fill out a requisition, that is approved by one department, which creates a purchase order, which is compared to the requisition before being sent to another department, which places the order with a vendor, who ships the order with an invoice, which must be reconciled against the purchase order in one department and the original requisition form in another.   While technology has digitized the paper and transmits the data through cables instead of vacuum tubes, it's still fundamentally the same process with all its redundancies and checkpoints that has been in existence since the nineteenth century.

This entire nonsensical system exists because the purchasing process itself has remained the same.   Computers replaced paper files with digital ones and transmits data over cables instead of vacuum tubes, the same way that typewritten orders replaced those written on parchment with ostrich feathers to be carried about by human runners.   Never once in all this time has it been questioned whether the process makes sense, or if a lot of the busyness of business could be reduced by reconsidering the necessity of the process in light of the capabilities of the technology with which it is executed.

This is the basis of my argument that technology alone isn't innovation: it makes the tasks we do faster and less cumbersome, but it doesn't change the pointless ritual of the process itself.  True innovation would not merely automate an existing way of doing things, but change the way things are done, eliminating busywork, redundancies, and the expense and delay that they cause.  But this didn't happen when technology was introduced - it merely mimicked the old way of doing things.

The second point of my argument is that technology smothers innovation, and immortalizes bad practices.   And that's a boarder argument - but one that seems sensible to anyone who has changed jobs and spent a significant amount of time having to be trained, or discover by trial-and-error, how "the system" works and the ridiculously complex things they have to do to perform a simple task.   And if you suggest there might be a better or more efficient way, you hear "the system won't let you do that."

It's paralyzing in the course of trying to implement process improvements by modifying existing information systems to eradicate some of the fuss and bother.   Why do we ask the person to enter the same data twice in the course of a single task?  Why do we ask for some information on screen five and other information on screen three when the two or closely related?    Because that's the way the back-end system is designed to work.   And why can't we change it?   Because it would be difficult and expensive to do so.

And that, I believe, is a serious issue for many firms who have lived for many years with information systems that has prevented any deviation from processes that have not changed in decades: even if they recognize that there would be greater expediency and efficiency in changing their business processes, they are being held back by archaic paradigms they are forced to accept by adopting technology that mimics traditional and entirely unnecessary processes.

In fairness, this has been a long rant by someone who has of late run into one too many brick walls and smeared lipstick on one too many pigs ... but I can't help the sense that the frustration that I feel at this moment is entirely warranted, and the blithe complacency to accept the limitations of outdated information technology is smothering innovation and progress.

And as much as I love to smirk at the irony that this has all been brought about by the very technology that promised to move us forward, I just can't muster the enthusiasm.  So I rant.  Isn't that what blogs are for?