Entrepreneurialship and technology
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
I work for a fairly large company during the day. People there act completely different than the entrepreneurs that I work with at night. Everybody at the day job is afraid, and it often forces them to make bad choices.
This is especially true concerning technology choices. Everything that we use is, at best, sub-par. Our IT group usually chooses technology based on what’s compatible with the rest of our infrastructure, or they choose based on who has the best support. I agree that these are important factors, but then the people who must use this technology end up suffering, and they rarely get any say in what’s chosen.
There are these massive ERP, CRM, and CMS systems, and their interfaces look like they were designed by entry-level designers. In one interface, a checkmark means “help.” Check = Help? Unless you’ve been living under a rock, wouldn’t you realize that the standard for “help” is a question mark? And in a complex interface that causes users to seek help more often than others, they’ve even hidden the help!
Companies like Oracle make a killing selling solutions like these. No wonder why their support is so good. If it wasn’t, then they’d be out of business. And then they get to charge companies more money to support this stuff.
New businesses have it good. We can start from scratch and use software that’s compatible with humans. But it does make me wonder if one day our choices will create a painful legacy much like the Fortune 1,000 is experiencing today. The most resilient IT groups will make sure that that never happens.
Are you working with such an IT group? Sure, IT is hard, and it’s expensive. But there is a surplus of talent out there right now, and it’s probably for the best that the less-talented will end up needing to seek other lines of work.
