Keeping Us in the Stone Age: It’s All About Control

Colleen: One area that might be interesting to consider is how management will often block technology and enforce the Let’s Do It The Old Way mentality. Some managers are afraid that they cannot manage what they do not understand. There is a fear that management will become too dependent on a single employee with IT skills. So they turn a quick simple solution into an expensive long term project by turning it over to the “professional developers.” (This is something I live through constantly. For example: We needed to convert some data from an obscure application with an unknown database type, so I just tried every ODBC connection on my computer, after about 15 minutes I found one that worked perfectly. Yet two months later I found out management hired a consulting company to develop a special program to convert the data: it took 2 programmers 2 weeks to develop their solution.)

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