Why organisations shouldn’t get too attached to their digital ‘vision’
In government, we talk a lot about building technology based on the needs of the people who will use it. But how does that work when there’s already a vision for what the solution should be?
In government it’s not unusual for digital projects to start with a vision. Generally the people who kick start the work understand the area and have a good idea of the problems. They’re excited about how technology can transform their work. And they’ve had a fair few ideas about what might help. In this context it’s understandable for them to have a vision for what a solution might look like. They’re smart, after all. They can see what might help to improve things. They also know that to get buy in for doing a project like this they’ll need to tell a compelling story about what they want to do and why.
We don’t know what we don’t know
Problems can arise when a digital team is brought in to carry out research into all the people, processes and systems affected. Digital teams have the luxury of analysing data from a lot of different sources. They talk to people at all levels of the organisation. They explore existing systems and processes. They look at the organisation from many angles. The findings can be illuminating but they can also highlight if an organisation’s vision isn’t quite right. There’s a wide range of reasons why that might be. The idea might be good but actually there’s another, more important piece of work to do first. Or it might be faster and cheaper to solve the problem in a different way. Perhaps you don’t need an IT solution at all, perhaps you just need some better ways of working.
Sometimes technology isn’t the answer
One client I worked for thought they needed a new intranet solution because it was impossible for staff to find the information they needed. They thought the problem was their intranet didn’t have the right features. Following research we realised the real problem was the organisation didn’t have robust archiving processes and content wasn’t being tagged in the right way. This meant thousands of old pages of content weren’t being archived which created a lot of unnecessary ‘noise’. And people couldn’t find newer, relevant content because it didn’t appear against the search terms they were using. Not a tech problem then, a workflow problem.
Courageous leaders follow the evidence
When research shows a different approach is needed, organisations need to have the courage to follow the evidence. This isn’t easy. Leadership teams can buy into an exciting vision or shiny new product so expectations need to be managed. The very best managers I’ve worked with did this and ultimately ended up being more respected rather than less. It’s easy to stick to your guns. Less so to change direction after weeks or months of planning. Sometimes though that’s what it takes to build something that works.
Conclusion
Smart organisations have knowledge about what needs fixing and ideas for how to solve their problems. But if they want to succeed they need to be open minded when new evidence is brought to light and flexible enough to change. If they can do that, they’ll be in a great place to build something that brings real value.