James Drogan

Re: Conversations with Dave 

There is a companion article to "The Trouble With Enterprise Software" in this issue (Fall 2007) of the MIT Sloan Management Review that also bears reading, "Avoiding the Alignment Trap in IT."  Its lead is “Information technology remains a terrible bottleneck to growth in most companies, mainly because executives focus on the wrong remedy for their IT problems.”

My sense is that neither article really explores the hypotheses that 1.) its the underlying complexity of the business that is often the progenitor of the issues these two articles address, and 2.) human nature is often a significant contributor to severity of the issues.

In the fall of 1988 I participated in a customer conference sponsored by the Burlington Northern (A Service Management System: The Role of Information Systems in the Preparation and Management of Transportation Service Packages, Forward Motion Symposium, sponsored by Burlington Northern, Las Colinas, November 1988) where, as I recall, I chanted two mantras. “Get the business right, then put the technology in.” and “Eliminate, simplify, automate; in that order.”

I continue to think these are applicable. However, as I argued in The Future, complexity may no longer be containable. Management of rising complexity at the necessary pace may require a deeper integration between the machine and the person (symbiotic decision support systems according to our old friend, Marvin Manheim).

I would suggest that if the issues raised in the two SMR articles are to be resolved, we need to look upstream.