On stating the obvious

Over on Techworld, Kieren McCarthy lays into the iSociety report on the grounds that it's stating the obvious.

Agreed: the report provides evidence for things that many people say they already know. My problem with this is: if they know it so well, why don't they act on it? How is it that we haven't moved on?

Why do management's continue naively to install monstrously expensive systems on empty rhetoric from vendors, only to see it fail to perform? And then do it all over again a year later. Why do they distance ICT departments from employees, and then wonder why communications are so poor? Why do they fail to train employees to use *any* software, and then wonder why users don't understand how anything works? Why do they blame employees for using their - nice and simple - email clients as their centre of operations, with thousands of emails stored, while they provide complex, dysfunctional and slow KM systems that fail to fulfill people's needs? And why do they ridicule people for printing out documents, while the rate of machine/system/network failure - often for days on end - stops everyone from getting on with their jobs?

It's all obvious stuff. It's just that it's all forgotten at the time when decisions are taken about ICT and how to use it. Too often, managers don't take ICT issues seriously, or in the context of organisation strategy, even when an entire organisation's emails are bouncing, or when the entire network has been down for three days (and there's still nobody around who knows about networks to fix it). Until the organisation comes to its knees, that is. Meanwhile, it's the staff that are manning the lifeboats.

More comment on the report over at The Register.