Too many business technology staff have a disease. Maybe you have seen it?
This shoot first and ask questions later is only a significant symptom, but let me back up first.
All business has a value chain. This value chain is the set of activities in your organization that produce the product or service that is actually delivered to your customers.
If you prefer to think in the concept of Open Systems, we can state that your business does not operate in a vacuum. Inputs, manipulation and outputs are required to physically get your product or service delivered.
And in many businesses, there is one common link that can help tie together each of those inputs and outputs;
Technology
Technology support in your business is not just data entry. In many cases creative knowledge workers can utilize technology based processes to reduce the friction that slows communication between the pieces of your value chain. By reducing friction, I mean reducing the gaps and time lost between individual steps.
As an example? a graphic artist creates material that has to go to print, but the individual that has to give the final approval forgets, so while the work is done, it is stuck in a crack, or gap of your internal value chain. These gaps are the common area where your IT can help streamline your internal processes.
That Technology Value Chain
I am going to break a rule here and temporarily extract your IT function out of your business – just like a schematic diagram.
If you could view your IT service in this way, you would see all the points where your IT touches and connects to the various business processes you operate.
So let me argue that IT is a type of internal value chain for your organization – any change to those touch points that connect other points will affect others. It will affect them through change, or it will affect them when they can’t get their job done because something is not working.
This Chain?
Technologists in the SME space must understand that IT does not exist in a vacuum. Nothing is discrete, you cannot just separate it like this simple schematic.
Everything that is done will positively or negatively impact the daily life and performance of somebody else. (And usually many someone else’s.)
And that is the problem
This shoot first,ask questions later in SME IT is a disease. Too many technologists never think of the impact that their decisions will have on others.
You can recognize the symptoms of this disease in many ways.
On symptom of this disease I call pop-a-clickaitis. Which is the tendency to think that if you click enough times, in enough places, stopping this or starting that, add in reboot as much as possible, that things will magically work out better. It won’t. At most people have been kicked out of whatever work they were in.
Another significant symptom of the shoot first disease?
An attitude in technologists – that says; “hey do it anyway , if something breaks, we will fix it afterward”
So what we have hear is ‘who cares about peoples work!
The SMB Takeaway
This shoot first tendency in many technologists is a self inflicted wound.
Ensure that it is eradicated in your shop
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