The Massive Gap in Leveraging Digital Opportunities

I was chatting with a friend recently who is newly retired from a municipal public service position. I was sharing some ideas about an upcoming IPAC TRG event (Follow @IPACToronto on Twitter where info will be provided soon) and he provided an account of related organizational issues he witnessed when a very significant investment in a geomatics application showed no return. 

His observations:

• The software was adopted on the all-too-common belief that in some magical way it was self-operating and its introduction would solve some informational problems without further ado
• As a result, there was no attempt to design or deliver a work process that would leverage the software (and no one accountable for that since it wasn't even imagined that it would be necessary)
• There was no consultation with anyone who might have to use it, and even had there been, given the fetishization of the software and the failure of accountability for a strategy to leverage it, consultation probably wouldn't have netted much value. 

It's not surprising that there was little or no interest in learning the software.
Now multiply that a few hundred thousand times and we have the modern workplace. In the meantime, it's left to the IT and admin to make whatever they can of it without full awareness of its potential value or purpose.

Onto that pile of blockage for moving into the 21st century, add 

• The governance map naturally resists being changed and collaborative technologies and their fruits can be seen as subversive

On Risk Aversion (Updated)

In 2009, I wrote this post on risk aversion.

Here's where it sits on my mind today.

Is risk aversion a fear of auditors, bad press or is it a fear of losing hegemony - a denial of the natural transformation that is occurring now towards models of complexity and resilience? 

It seems we prefer the illusion of control, governed by models that are 
- analytical
- artificial 
- categorical 
- linear 
- hierarchical
- authoritarian
- siloed
- mechanical, and
- simplistic. 

To be able to achieve manageable simplicity, we would have to be able to identify and control the context, the boundaries, the parameters in which we operate. This is not possible, if it ever was. 

But how do we change that the easier way?