Whose Fault Is It When Collaboration Software Sucks?
by Volker Weber
Michael Sampson thoughtful as ever:
A vendor see a market opportunity for collaboration software. It builds a product to enable teams to work together, share information, and coordinate action. It signs up business partners who see the promise of the offering. They start offering services to the market based on the product. Organizations embrace it. Some find great success and rave about it. Others think it is the worst thing ever created and do nothing but complain. In either case ... success or failure ... who is to be praised or blamed?
Comments
Well, actually, this is not limited to collaboration software. I think it pretty much applies to most if not all technology. The understanding of the technological base for those who design businesses is crucial but is often missing in the board rooms. Members of boards (and this may very often be extended to major parts of the entire management) typically don't really consider technological knowledge as relevant for their positions.
These are the people who also think that "IT doesn't matter" (as Nicholas Carr put it in his controverse and provoking HBR article). They consider IT a commodity, handle it that way and thus can't generate a competitive advantage from it. And still might be economically successful.
Then there are organizations which consider IT an important base of their business, which consider it a source of competitive advantage and which do manage it accordingly.
Anyways, I do think though, that consultants (in this case often called business partners) can sometimes be blamed as well. Some sell projects which are from the very beginning doomed to fail, because they use technologies for things which they aren't designed to be used for. Obviously, you would consider these the "not good" consultants. But how should an organization differentiate those from the good ones? To do so, substantial knowledge about the domain is necessary, which is often not available (hence the need for consultants in the first place).
So, in short, while I generally agree to Michaels argument, I think it might paint the picture a little simplified.
Simplified as it may be, it deals with one of the most important (and still unanswered) questions of my business life: Why is it that some people love and some people hate Domino and what can one do about it?
At least I feel less alone now. ;-)
