Arnold Kling, writing about Electronic Medical Records, says:

I spent much of my career in business, and much of my focus was on use of information technology (IT). Among the lessons I learned were.

1. Within a company, every business area gets the IT it deserves. Chaotic, haphazard business areas get lousy IT (and blame the IT department). Organized, well-run business areas get great IT.

2. Data cannot be maintained unless there is clarity of ownership. It must be clear who is responsible for creating, maintaining, updating, and deleting the data.

The best IT organizations are run like a great store (complete with consultative sales). In order for them to be affective, they need to be attached to a well managed company that knows what it wants. It’s not IT’s job to champion projects, to drive change, or to come up with ideas. It’s their job to understand what the business needs, come up with products that support it, and work with the business to implement them. If your technology department keeps turning out crap, you need to stop complaining and start thinking about what exactly you asked them for. Odds are, it was either nothing or crap, and either way, it’s not really their fault.

Note, however, that undisciplined software projects that are poorly executed are the fault of IT. That’s where they stop running a great store, and it makes the business side want to shop someplace else. Business leaders need to intervene there and take a look at how they can shake up the IT organization, most likely through some sort of change in leadership.

Categories: Business and Economics, Managing, Technology
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If the information economy is driven by the young, and it’s millenials who are saturated with the share-your-life-with-everyone world of the internet, why are most of the blogs I read written by old people, either Boomers or late Gen-Xers? Some hypotheses:

1. Young people aren’t very good writers yet, so nobody wants to read them. Older bloggers have had decades to refine their writing, and practice makes it better. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are if you can’t communicate them well.
2. Older people have more to say. They’ve spent decades accumulating experience, usually in a specific area (economics, human resources, technology), and that makes their opinions more valuable. It also gives them a greater bank of stories to share from, tempers their ideas with a knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in the real world, and most importantly, lends them credibility on an internet that’s something pretty scarce.
3. Good blogs have focus, and young people don’t. Millennials are still trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives through some magical personal quest that nobody cares about. It makes their blogs tough to follow. Boomer blogs have a single cohesive idea that attracts those who are interested and keeps them tuning in.

After the recent lapse in posting, prepare for some changes in this blog. Cohesive idea: making better decisions.

Categories: Generations, Social Software, Technology
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