My colleague Janet Clary has written a good post about the importance of implementation of innovations.
Her gist is that everyone likes to talk about innovation, but putting innovations into practice is tough.
I think Janet is thinking about any kind of innovation/implementation, but her post made me think about technology implementation.
I think there must be a Rule of Five that says that any implementation of any technology is five times harder than you think it’s going to be.
And I think it applies to everything from implementing a new LMS to setting up a new printer at your house.
Here are some things, off the top of my head, that I know are five times harder to do than they sound:
O Having wireless access at a conference.
O Sending an automatic e-mail to an e-mail list.
O Sending large files by e-mail.
O Giving a presentation from a laptop.
O Giving outsiders access to online courses.
O Handling the technical aspects of a blog.
O Having a meeting of ten people in Second Life.
(You can probably think of a dozen others.) And these are just everyday technologies. Nothing compared to implementing an enterprise system.
Those of us who write about technology innovations should stop every now and then and take our hats off to the people who are out there fighting through the bandwidths, betas, bouncebacks, browsers, cards, downloads, drivers, errors, firewalls, instructions, interoperabilities, legacies, logins, plugins, scripts, standards, operating systems, updates, uploads, versions, and everything else.
As Janet says, it’s one thing to talk about it. It’s another to really do it.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
When I began working in the training field, I noticed a framed quotation in a colleague’s office:
Things take longer than they do.
It was attributed to Bill Deterline, but I’m inclined to think someone else — Amenhotep, maybe, or Hammurabi.
There’s a relative principle in here somewhere to go along with your hat-tip to the tech wranglers: the stuff we know how to do wasn’t coded into our DNA, either.
Two incidents this past week underscored this for me.
The first was trying to help my brother (not cowed by computers) to set up his own blog. I say ‘trying’ because I don’t see much point in “click here, now click there, now do this, now do that” for things he’ll need to do again on his own. He’s not cowed by computers, but he hasn’t had a blog, so the admin side of WordPress was like the first look at a car engine. Where the hell is the brake fluid?
The second incident: I’ve had a blog just for my parents for over two years. I started it because it’s much easier for them than email: no misfiled items, no baffling attachments.
My daughter, who can post items for them on the same blog, posted a link to a video she uploaded showing her three daughters (5 and under) wearing the family-tartan kilts I got them and trying to dance the Highland fling.
Here’s the thing: the clickable image and accompanying text link didn’t say click here. And the target audience (my parents), although online for about six years, hasn’t gotten to the point of mousing over an image to see if it’s clickable.
Things take longer than they do.
Great point, Dave. Your examples remind me of our Awards program: we often have to remind Awards entrants and judges about simple things that aren’t really that simple, like a URL that’s not working may have broken across two lines.
There’s this amazing paradox between the miracles that are technically possible today (like camcorders that automatically upload to YouTube) and the nitty-gritty implementation of those technologies.