Ideas are wonderful, inspiring, and enlightening. Technology can be the same. Making the ideas reality and the technology work in organisations is whole other matter. Too often I see us, I participate in, designing technology and ideas that assume a dependency on a separate business process or team to do a critical task. We outsource a critical task and then fail to engage the other team. And then weirdly, we are shocked when things fail.

I talk here about the importance of understanding business processes (current and new) while implementing new ideas and change. Identifying them are one thing, ensuring they are dealt with are another.

Again, it is critical to differentiate between what the technology can do and what needs to happen ‘offline’, but we can’t assume the ‘offline’ part will just happen. It’s usually the harder part and takes the most amount of work to get right, yet we also focus on it the least. Weirdly, we assume our frontline staff will just figure it out, will know what is needed; we forget they have a gazillion other demands on them as well.