Leadership
Designing technology systems around the people who use them
Systems fail in the hands of capable people when the design assumed a different organisation than the one that actually exists.
6 min read
Technology projects still fail in a familiar way: the process looked coherent in a workshop, the screens looked coherent in a demonstration, and then the people who do the work could not recognise their day in the system. They kept a side process. The official system became a reporting obligation rather than a tool.
Users are not a testing phase
The people who raise tickets, count stock, train staff or review KPIs already have a model of the work. A system that ignores that model will be ‘correct’ and unused. Designing around them does not mean collecting every preference. It means understanding the constraints they operate under: time, language, connectivity, approval paths, and what they will be blamed for if something goes wrong.
Leadership uses systems too
A second failure mode is designing only for operators and leaving leadership with exports. Executives then recreate the spreadsheet the system was meant to replace. The product needs both surfaces: the operational one that records the work, and the leadership one that makes the work visible without distorting it.
The central discipline is unchanged: understand the business problem, understand the technology, understand the data, and build the solution with the people who will live in it. That is not a softer form of engineering. It is how engineering becomes useful.
This article is a starting point. The page structure is ready for a longer, fully edited version later.
Further reading
Data
Why organisations should stop treating data as an IT problem
If data only becomes a priority when a report is late, the organisation does not have a data function. It has an extraction habit.
6 min read
Technology
Building internal business applications without creating technical debt
Internal software goes wrong when it is treated as a quick replacement for a spreadsheet, with none of the discipline the spreadsheet was quietly providing.
7 min read
Data
What makes a good organisational dashboard?
A dashboard is not a gallery of charts. It is a decision surface. If it does not change what someone does this week, it is decoration.
5 min read
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