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Naked CIO: Has tech made us dumber?
Or the business anyway...

By Naked CIO

Published: Monday 01 December 2008

Applications that were meant to make business users more productive have instead turned them into mere button pushers. It's time to change that, says the Naked CIO.

The age of intuitive and seamless software applications has spawned an android population of business users who can no longer think or maintain business operations effectively. More and more when they need to change a business process, they look to IT to help them articulate and navigate changes.

However, this was never the concept of seamless systems that can automate processes. The concept was to make computing more effective and cut out laborious processes that bottleneck productivity. Most effective up-to-date applications are rules-based, data-intuitive - and drive business functions based on logical processing rules.

I now wonder if that was a good idea. By having applications configured to handle business rules and account for the intellectual capital of making decisions, business users are becoming less capable of understanding core functions of the job they do.

The best analogy or example I can think of is GPS navigation. Thanks to the technology users can no longer find their way around on their own - and if they move house or travel they expect the system to give them directions.

I have been on a power trip recently to rid my departments of administrative processes we have inherited from business units at some point in time for no particular reason. Functions that are clearly non-technical and material not to IT but to the business had embedded themselves in day-to-day work practices of the IT department. We have seemingly become the catch-all department for anything that uses a computer and that no one else wants to do.

When I try to offload these administrative functions back to the business, it is unbelievable the push-back and tension this causes. While no one wants to take ownership of these functions the only clear certainty is they have no business being in IT. For example recently I tried to offload the set up of credit card merchant accounts. This created an international incident of enormous proportions - yet no one could provide a valid argument for why my staff were performing this function.

This is just one of the many functions I have battled to offload in recent months. The standard argument is that there is no one else to perform the task and the business doesn't know how to do it.

So is technology dumbing down users to the extent that all they know how to do is push buttons? Are we becoming a slave to technology because of its convenience and not treating it as a tool that can make us smarter and more effective at our jobs?

How can we possibly move our businesses forward with a battalion of button pushers that have no capacity to think?

And when thought is required, even if it has nothing to do with IT, somehow the function gets absorbed into our departments, depreciating our true effectiveness in dealing with IT issues and impacting the perception of the value of our real services.

It is yet another example of the 'bottom feeder' mentality of the business towards the IT function. We are the janitorial closet of our company - we clean up every mess, IT or otherwise. I am in the process of specifically defining what IT should and shouldn't do, to make it clear to our users that dumping problems and administrative functions to IT because they don't want to do it is no longer acceptable.

It is time to stop mopping up after our business colleagues and require them to do more than push buttons. Perhaps taking ownership of their own functions where they should be experts could actually bring more value to the business.

As for us CIOs, don't be tricked into thinking you are 'empire building' when really you are taking on functions your staff have no right or capability to absorb.