When Culture Trumps Technology

I was dumbfounded when my colleague "Sue" (not  her real name) announced in a meeting that the decision had been made to use "Redhat", our department file share server, for the collaboration and document management needed for an important, new, company-wide, committee and subcommittees. While it was not mentioned in the meeting, I knew that this committee would eventually need to share its work with a group of outside reviewers.





I gulped and blurted out, "Did you think about using Google Drive?" What a stereotypical tech guy thing to do. Skip all the discussion, consideration, dialog and feel-good collaboration and go straight to the solution. I knew that Google Drive would meet all their needs and minimize the need for IT to set things up and keep them going. I scheduled a meeting in which I would review the many advantages of Google Drive. I dazzled them with my brilliance as I showed them example after example of how easy Drive is to use.

Fast forward one week. The CFO sends me an email. He just got out of a committe kickoff meeting where it was announced they would be using ... wait for it ... flash drives for document management and collaboration. 

Head exploding. Can't think straight. What to do? How can this be happening? I just showed them all the amazing wonders and advantages of Drive. I guess my educational/training meeting was a complete failure. I had been planning a big Google Drive launch this fall with training and promotional messaging and the whole deal. Now a highly visible group of campus leaders have put the bus in reverse and stepped on the gas!

As I stewed and thought about all of this I realized that a much deeper problem exists that gave rise to this problem. That is the familiar old "silo" problem that so many organizations struggle with. I recently heard this referred to as "culture trumps technology". Rather than view the IT folks as subject matter experts in technology and go to them with a list of requirements, a group of well-meaning users "solves" the problem on their own. They wonder why on earth the IT guy wastes their time ranting about some new-fangled way of storing documents in the "cloud". 
Sensing that there was something bad about the "Redhat" solution (why else would IT have raised red flags?), they went back to find a better solution, but again on their own.

So, at the end of the day, the "silo" culture takes over and prevents the application of the right technology to the problem at hand. Successful, modern organizations are good at the latter. Organizations that can't or won't use computers for what they are good at, and people for what they are good at, will languish in mediocrity.

Are you using your technology people as experts? IT should be your first stop when you have a project that involves technology. And don't tell them the solution you need (I need 10 flash drives), tell them what you are trying to do (I need to share documents among 10 committees and post the results to a web site). Then heed what they say!

Don't let (bad) culture trump (good) technology!