The Emotional Intelligence of IT

In his Forrester blog post Thoughts On Recession...And ECM Adoption, Kyle McNabb writes:

"To put it bluntly, implementation teams know who their users are, but they know very little about the people that will use the technology. And focusing on users often leads to implementing technology in a way that materially changes the way people work...a big cause of poor document management adoption in particular."

He makes a good point. The solution is simple but far from easy to implement. In my experience as a technologist and now as an adviser / writer (FT columnist advising business leaders on IT issues) the majority of technologists do not have the emotional intelligence / motivation to want to get into the shoes of the users.

Systems are traditionally built to requirements either articulated formally or informally. The underlying motivations of the users are not typically documented. Nor are the power structures / politics within which the systems will operate. Nor are the real business processes or business imperatives documented.

I agree that any attempts at user segmentation would be a good thing. But that would just be the start of a very long journey.