Bad tech can cripple companies and turn productive people into data entry folks. I saw this first hand as a professor, when @cornell's bad IT infrastructure turned professors into clerical workers.
There was a year when I had to go to a web page and click on a button between 9am-noon on Wednesdays, just like Desmond in Lost.
The key problem is that most enterprise software fails to support delegation, so tasks that were previously done by admin assistants can no longer, because admins aren't on the right access control lists.
Of course, admins love this, as the bad IT infrastructure enables them to push tasks onto their constituents. For more than half a decade, we couldn't get any changes enacted to IT infra, the requests got buried up the chain. The situation hasn't actually materially improved.
We had someone who had invented a delegation logic laboriously tutor the IT folks on delegation, but there are no results yet. Rigid enterprise systems built by outsourcers don't work well at capturing the informal delegation networks in successful enterprises, period.
Think about the complex delegation structure in any healthy organization. Someone may be authorized to make decisions far beyond their "pay grade." In the 90s, admins routinely made 10k to 100k spending decisions, if there was a precedent and they were repeating last year.
Now you bring in some software built in India to a spec written by some middle manager, and there are rigid rules. Admins cannot do anything at all, there is no concept of delegation.
Worse, integration means that there are no compartments -- I can't give my password to someone, because they would be able to redirect my retirement funds. If we had non-unified systems, we could at least do delegation by sharing passwords, but no, "single sign on" killed that.
Overall, enterprise software is absolutely terrible.
The glimmer of hope is that startup culture leads to a different, cleaner, simpler, more orthogonal system interface aesthetic. It's like Unix to the Multics aesthetic that pervades klunky enterprises today.
The glimmer of hope is that startup culture leads to a different, cleaner, simpler, more orthogonal system interface aesthetic. It's like Unix to the Multics aesthetic that pervades klunky enterprises today.
