Buy smarter tech
Your garbage technology comes from your stupid technology acquisition process. Can’t stress this enough: stop buying shit in stupid ways – you are fucking up your enterprise.
Using a huge spreadsheet to compare software and do “POCs” to “prove technology works” instead of about “proving it has business value” is a great way to accomplish nothing. Stop wasting time, and kindly quit so that your business and the rest of the world can move on without you.
If you need a spreadsheet to tell you how to think, you have bigger problems. Here is the good news. Your processes can be fixed and you can play a key role in that.
Focus on understanding how different technologies work, what problems they solve and what they can/can’t do. Tie those back to specific problems your business is facing and exactly what return the business can expect.
You’re trying to bake a cake, so you go oven shopping. Along your journey, you find someone selling knives. You realize that the knife can’t bake a cake, but the knife does amazing stuff.
You have two choices. You can either:
- Follow the spreadsheet that says we must buy ovens, and maybe even refer the knife seller to the cutting department
- OR take the opportunity to learn something new. Figure out how much money in your organization is tied to shit that a knife CAN do well.
Maybe you need to be in the oven business and the knife business.
Your “boss” asked you to go find something that can make a cake? Who cares? Learn something new, and do both. It takes an extra few hours to learn about a new technology. Keep that shit in your mind so you can jump on it the next time you hear an opportunity that could fit. Always look for ways to deliver business value in ANY business unit.
If you’re worried about alienating people in other departments, go slowly. Make them successful, step out of the limelight. Learn on your own time and then use it to get a better job somewhere else. The critical thing is to seek technology opportunities constantly and learn as much as you can.
If that department is failing, you have the opportunity to take a risk. Learn, prepare, make that vendor with cutting edge technology pledge undying loyalty to you. Then, go after it. If you succeed, they’ll consolidate that shit under you. Happens all the time.
They’ll put Finance and IT under one executive because the woman who led one had a ton of new approaches that created a ton of value. Leadership saw her shit gold bricks and gave her more “problem” departments full of whiners.
