Wisdom of Dan Meyer

Couple of days ago my colleague sent me an inspiring video from the TED Talks. The video was called, Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover, and it was about the flaws in the way math was taught in the US. Mr. Meyer was dead on with the problem.

After which I spent a couple of days thinking about it and realized that this was also the case with Information Technology (IT) in many companies. Most executive management and middle management want to address most if not all IT problems with tools. Here are some commons answers I have heard for major problems:

• Need an Enterprise Architecture Capability within our organization
  
• Let's buy an Enterprise Architecture Tool

• Need to understand the current state of sensitive information in our organization
• We need a tool to do analysis

• Need an Application Portfolio Management (APM) Capability within our organization
• Let's buy an APM tool or upgrade our existing APM tool
  

• Need to pick a technology and product to address significant IT problem
• Let's buy the recommended tool from Gartner or Forrester Research

• Need to introduce metrics for IT in our organization
• Let's buy or build a Dashboard tool.

As you can see, the formulation of the problem and ability to formulate a strategy on how to solve the problem are replaced by simply buying or building a tool.

It's time to stop watching "Two and a Half" and meet with your customers and understand their problems and anticipate future problems from the customers' broken processes.