New Mantra for Technology

My new mantra for choosing technology is Define Your Process Then Pick Your Tools. These seven words can help many of us avoid mistakes and get more bang for our technology buck.

Picking your tools then starting to work has been the way of IT since the beginning, and it's wrong. You see it all the time. Need to track a bunch of data items? Many people's first choice is a spreadsheet. Need to keep valuable information you receive? Stuff your e-mail inbox full and never export any information to a database (or even a spreadsheet).

People have done business this way for just about ever, hence the old "if all you've got is a hammer all your problems look like nails" saying. But this goes far beyond homilies. Part of the "Maximizing your technology dollar" column describes a way you can define the processes your business uses to get work done. Not the process as you think it should be, but as it really is. Once you understand the actual process, you can make changes with appropriate technology.

Too often businesses buy technology for the processes they wish they had rather than the ones they actually have. But the mantra Define Your Process Then Pick Your Tools eliminates that mistake. Define the job to be done, examine your processes, and verify those processes. Then, and only then, you're ready to start talking about technology.