By Norman's definition:
"Slips result from automatic behavior... Mistakes result from conscious deliberations"I've found myself slipping more lately.
To paraphrase Norman, when your goal is correct, but you get lost in the execution, that's a slip. When your goal is wrong, that's a mistake (especially if you accomplish that goal).
Our goals, by and large, are the right ones... but we're all too often trying to reach those goals by doing things the way that we've always done things. We're not consciously choosing our approaches for problem solving - We're automatically going through the steps.
As usual, I'm going to bring this back to the development and maintenance of Business Software Solutions...
We know that the environment that our business inhabits is constantly changing. New competitors enter the scene, governments change their policies, our supporting infrastructure becomes unreliable... We have to respond to these changes, or our business (government, country) will falter.
Adapt or perish.
The goal of Business Software Solutions is always two-fold:
- Make the Business more profitable
- Make the Business stronger (more able to weather changes)
Business must be able to run smoothly (to make a profit). Anything in our organization that helps us to run smoothly is "a good thing".
Business must be able to adapt to change. Anything in our organization that impedes our ability to adapt to change is "a bad thing".
IT groups help us to run smoothly, so they are indeed a very, very good thing... But when we rely on our IT groups to "drive" when our business must adapt to a change... well... then often the IT group is seen as an impediment to change (a very, very bad thing).
It's an error if you rely on IT to drive business change... IT doesn't know your business as well as you do. They know a lot of things that can really help you, but it's simply not their job to drive the direction of your business.
I'm going to make an un-founded assertion: Most businesses are unconsciously ceding the driving (of change implementation) duties to IT. It's not a conscious decision, it's an automatic response based on the deep seated insecurity that the "T" in IT is so horrendously complex that if business ever messed with it all hell would break loose.
Perhaps... but "I" is what's important. Information is the treasure, and business groks the information and decides what to do with it.
You have to drive, and if you abdicate that responsibility (consciously or unconsciously) you've made an error and taken us one step closer to the world described in The Marching Morons.
Business has to consciously hold the reigns, and IT has to respond to guidance. We can't have Software Development Life Cycle dogmas that tell business "you can't do that" and we can't have "Scrum Nazis" dictating to business which features get implemented or deferred.
To really make this happen - in my less than humble opinion - we have to stop slipping up and set a conscious goal of really enabling the business to drive our software projects, and to do that we have to set a conscious goal to make software solutions comprehensible to business people...
You can't drive what you don't understand... so we've got to subjugate our cool software development desires to the goal of "the business can see what you did". They may not understand everything that's "under the hood", but they can't drive unless they can see all the parts, see how they're combined, and understand what they do.
