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Does Technology Make Managers Lazy?

February 5, 2007 - by Robert E. Stevens, GENESIS II (The Second Beginning) E-Mail: bob@views-hills.com


The above question was posed by Mr. Gerry McGovern in one of his recent papers.  Gerry, who lives in Ireland, publishes a paper, New Thinking Publication, similar to the Views.  ActualIy, Gerry and I frequently share our thoughts.  If interested, you can subscribe to Gerry’s papers by writing to him at gerry@gerrymcgovern.com.


Gerry’s article under the above question fits well with my Views of 11/30/06 titled “I do not have the time.”  Following are a few excerpts from Gerry’s article of 12/10/06.


“Technology does not replace the need for good management.  Without such management, technology can create more problems than it solves.  lt's hard to resist the easy option.  Buy this customer relationship management (CRM) software, and you will efficiently and cost-effectively be able to manage your customer relationships.  Buy this content management software, and you will be able to efficiently and cost-effectively manage your content.  Software does not manage.  People manage.  Software is a tool that can help you manage better, but it is not a manager.  It is not strategic.  Before you can manage customer relationships, you have to have relationships with your customers.


It amazes me the amount of organizations out there that still believe that to create a better intranet or public website, all they need to do is choose the right content management software.  These organizations are not thinking about the quality and effectiveness of the content.  They’ll employ junior people to put up this content, and then a couple of years later they’ll wonder where it all went wrong.


Technology can support strategy.  It can support managers as they do their jobs. But technology is not a strategy, and it is certainly not management.”


I think it is appropriate to repeat a quote from Peter Drucker that states,

“The computer may have done more harm than good by making managers even more inwardly focused.  Executives are so enchanted by the internal data the computer generates, and that’s all it generates so far, that they have neither the mind nor the time for the outside.  Some believe that it’s not age that is the main cause of memory loss.  They argue it's a problem of information overload, our memory disks are full.”


In 2004, Gerry McGovern also had a few comments that fit well into this discussion. Namely,

"You are supposed to outsource and offshore the non-essential functions, so that you can focus on what really matters, and on what you do really well.  If this is the case, then support must be one of the most minor functions within the modern organization.  The customer gets their questions answered by a third party contractor who has a couple of weeks of training and reads from a script.”

Another quote worth repeating is

“Organizations that oursource their support are outsourcing their customer relationships and outsourcing their brands.”




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