Server maintenance

Change for tech sake

Uncategorized
(Image: Stockfresh)

20 November 2013

There is an interesting interview elsewhere on this site with David Coplin, Microsoft’s chief envisioning officer (horrible job title) in which he argues technology is not only “constraining how people work. It is enabling people to do the same things they have always done rather than enabling them to reinvent them”.

He talks about a collision within organisations between the two cultures of sharing knowledge and retaining it to preserve power, adding “we have not yet found the right balance. And it is a balance because it is not one or the other”. Coplin is clear that technology is not the solution: “You don’t solve this problem by buying more technology.”

He’s right of course, because there has been a longstanding conflict within organisations between sharing knowledge and retaining it but I wonder if, in this context, it matters that much. The truth is that major industrial and technological changes down through the ages have rarely done anything to alter the balance and culture within organisations. What they have done is force people to modify their working patterns and behaviour to accommodate the industrial or technological process.

Organisations have been more than happy for this to occur because they have seen much wider benefits for their operations and the opportunity to increase efficiency and profits. That efficiency gain isn’t viewed in terms of the person employed by the business but the systems it has deployed. Culturally, once an organisation adopts a particular industrial or technological strategy, it locks itself into a process where making improvements to the way its chosen technology works is one of the most important aspects of its business philosophy.

The people an organisation employs are then called on to adapt their working practices to suit the technology. In other words, as Coplin puts it, “technology has become the prism, not the release”. At its most extreme, you could even call it a “prison”.

It is in the context of this prism effect that Coplin suggests technology “is enabling people to do the same things they have always done rather than enabling them to reinvent them” but I wonder if that is quite right. Another argument might be to suggest that technology has reinvented the things people have always done, but it has done so to suit the technology rather than the people.

Coplin views technology as a mechanism to deliver the fruits of cultural change across an organisation but not as the enabler of that cultural change. This is something of a chicken and egg situation because you could equally argue that cultural change is being inhibited by the technology organisations already have and the way it dictates their business practices.

As major purveyors of technology to many of those organisations, channel partners ought to be caught in the middle of this cultural and technological divide. If they are that’s a good sign and it provides them with the opportunity to help customers make significant changes to the culture of their business without making it a hostage to the technology. If they’re not, it may be because technology has taken over the business and become the prism through which it is reflected.

Read More:


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie