BA or Business Awareness (not)

A couple of weeks ago, Computer Weekly quoted a doctor on his response the the current flurry of activity - backed by £2.3bn - around the NHS National Programme:

"It scares me that when talking to most IT systems suppliers none of them seem to have given any understanding to the mechanism of how doctores make decisions." (CW, 15 July 2003, p8)

Quite. That, according to one NHS senior developer, is because NHS system suppliers - who are a breed apart, but not that different from other supplier groups in the public and private sectors - do not look at how people work, on site (though they do send along salesmen to convince management of the rightness of their 'solution'.)

Now, British Airways finds itself in the firing line. Many column inches have been written about this face-off with check-in staff, and how much it will cost the company, but one commentary was particularly striking: a BBC News 24 report early one morning a couple of days ago reported in passing that these low-paid women, working in expensive locations SE England at £10-12K FTE, on part-time shifts, and many with young children, had for years informally rearranged their own shifts among themselves, to suit family circumstances. That is, they saw to it that the job got done, regardless of circumstances, and then filled out the paperwork accordingly. [This potential for local, flexible solutions was perhaps one of the few plus points of the job.]

But the imposition of BA's new and formal swipe card system at a stroke - or swipe - took away their collective ability to manage their own work, individually and as a local collective. Which suggests that BA was not aware that its new system failed to cater for local staff arriving at their own solutions: in other words, it knew little about work processes inside the company, before imposing its own 'solution'.

I leave it to you to draw any parallels or make any appropriate generalisations.