Listening to the meeting this morning, it occurs to me that the difference between a tech company and other companies is that the adoption of tech is much lower at the other companies. Business wise this lends weight to the 37signals/unix approach to creating a tool that only solves the problem. At my current company, Thermo, the peers I work with are very intelligent when it comes to science. However, when it comes to tech/software they think they know more than they do and they expect that new software will easily solve all the problems. In practice they are always waiting to upgrade to the next version or the out-side consultant to solve the issue. Instead of realizing that a PhD in Biology (or whatever) has no relevance to computers, software or the web; instead, I see them try to ‘defend their thesis’ by changing the subject or going off on a tangent, they focus on the symptoms, not the root cause. Ironically, the IT department does the same. They don’t manage up very well to the executives so they spend all of their time “putting out fires” and addressing the symptoms of the business problems instead of addressing the root cause. Well, in this case they are not exactly causes, they are root business needs. They need a modern catalog system that will let them store product information and make it available to customers via: print, web, download. Everything else should be secondary to this concern because they have to see where the publishing industry is going.
3/16/2011 ~ 2 min read
