Digital paleontology and innovation impediments

Digital palentology is the process of studying why old obsolete code is still used in large organizations.   The code or technology fossilizes and is perpetuated regardless of easier, less expensive, and features of newer systems.

People are motivated by what they can do rather than what they can do better.  While this statement isn’t a universal truth for all workforces, it is a common impediment to innovation. When software becomes so deeply engraved in the workflow of an individual, old software and outdated systems become necessary evils.  Thus, the process of updating not only includes technical hurdles, but also political log jams.

In the long run, politics and contracts become more a factor of the implementation of a new content management system than any technical problems.  Keep in mind that this situation only exists when an aging system, regardless of how painful and inefficient, becomes part of the work flow.

I’ve personally witnessed this in several organizations all resulting in different attempts in providing potential solutions including hiring outside constants and ninjaing.

Preparing to get rid of the fossil often begins with a planning phase. This pre-solution measure often occurs in the form of a technological audit.  A consulting company comes in and makes recommendations that have no chance of actually implementing because they fail to recognize the inner politics of an organization.  Consultants often don’t or can’t spend the time learning about the employees their changes affect the most.  After all, in many cases, consultants are working on providing their own recommendations rather than implementing their own recommendations.  The result is inevitable failure. I’ve also spoke with consultants who try to learn the internal processes of organizations only to be slowed down by politics.  In many situations, people do not want to be interviewed about their workflow and what they do during the day.  I can only surmise that many people do not want to be outed or tracked in what they actually accomplish.  So…. it becomes extremely hard to pre-plan for problems you can not account for without actually know what the workforce is doing.

The other phenomenon of dealing with Fossils I call Ninjaing.  It generally manifests as an internal uprising within a company or organization to eliminate the fossil secretively.  The end goal is to prevent politics from entering any part of their solution.  Small groups get together and attempt to implement their own systems while hiding their progress.  This development is often secretive because it relies on other parties not knowing about any potential changes.   If all goes well, a ninja team will have a fully working product before someone finds out what the group is actually working on.  This product then turns into an ultimatum.  Take this product or lose all the work we’ve done to fix the issues with the Fossil.

Fossils are difficult to deal with and sometimes eliminating fossils from the record can be downright impossible.  Getting consensus on change is never an easy thing to do. I would love to hear about potential solutions to digital paleontology. My initial gut feeling is that solving problems of entrenchment requires strong leadership from a single individual who can cut through all the BS.  I’ll end this note by stating Fossils are a combination of technical and political problems within an organization.  One of the biggest problems is accounting for all the technical issues without consideration for the politics of the environment.

Tags: code, innovation, process, software, systems

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Business Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.