Transforming IT Culture: How to Use Social Intelligence, Human Factors and Collaboration to Create an IT Department That Outperforms

Chapter 2

Corporate America’s IT Organization

Failure Is All Too Common

The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.

—Pema Chödrön

In the information technology (IT) profession, the actors change yet the failures remain the same. We remain ignorant of the human factors that drive knowledge worker productivity, with the most expensive, least understood resource being our talent. Although we have been funding large IT initiatives for over half a century, the bigger the investment, the more likely you will have a total write-off. We are unable to break free of a cultural model that embraces process warmly while coldly treating people, thus perpetuating a cycle of project failure in this human-centric, emotional endeavor. The lost productivity and wasted investment is a shameful waste of competitive resources. Realistically, factories that consistently produced such a low yield would have been shuttered long ago.

Corporate America’s ignorance of the human factors of productivity, and our reliance on all things unhuman, has been long in the making. Henry Ford turned on the first moving assembly line in 1913 and established a revolution in the production of manufactured goods at Ford’s Highland Park, Michigan, plant. By combining the moving assembly line, standardized components, and a range of resources, including steel, energy, rubber, and “human resources,” Ford designed a step-by-step fabrication process that minimized his cost and maximized his ...