The Myth of "Just Do IT"

Shubham Nath
MBA class of 2006

Avant Garde March 2005

Information Technology introduced the first step towards the idiosyncrasy of a fully automated world. Its advent lit the ray of hope, that one-day life would be so convenient that pressing buttons and switches here and there would be all that would be required to accomplish our ends. But as they say the trailers are meant to pull you to the theatre, whether you sit through till ?The End? is your own prerogative. The appeal of the movie varies from person to person and so does its liking. In case of IT too, the feedback from the innovators was so positive in magnitude that it brought a tsunami in the adoption of the technology. People without thinking about the larger context of its utility and applicability, adopted it. But not many could sustain in the automated environment for long. Reasons of course varied from organization to organization:
Business and Technology are independent of each other.
A lot of organizations adopted IT under the impression that an automated environment would lead to more business generation. However, in due course of time it was realized that though IT can provide faster, better and informed decision-making, it is only a means to the ends and not the end itself. As was seen in the Indian banking industry, introduction of online banking by several MNC banks prompted indigenous banks like SBI to adopt it too. SBI?s attempt to automate was more of an attempt to stay abreast with the competition rather than to generate business. In case of SBI such an adoption of IT was justified but for many banks that have the legacy of serving rural populations as well, adoption of IT becomes a source of ambivalence. An attempt to stay abreast may lead to the loss of their niche markets, which lie in the rural areas.
Computers are only as good as the programmers
IT is only a platform to boost organizational practices; the onus of its success however still lies on the people working in the organization who use it. It is ultimately the innovations and initiatives of the employees, which lead to the success of the whole exercise, and after all ?The human brain is the best machine?. Also the implementation of IT opens doors to a whole new world of malpractices like avid use of Internet during work hours, hacking of confidential documents etc. These activities thus undermine the advantages of implementation of IT.
Contingencies are Inevitable
Even as automation promises the reduction in paperwork, most organizations wouldn?t take a risk of relying only on the automated version. Organizations prefer to mitigate the risk of loss of information owing to catastrophe by maintaining hard copy repositories of information. This practice on several occasions defeats the very purpose of implementation of IT, which was to reduce paperwork. Organizations that still insist on doing away with pen and paper keep backup servers in distant locations. This not only leads to nearly double capital investments but also leads to redundancies eg. Transferring all the transaction details at the end of the day to the remote location server may be painful and time consuming.
Acceptance of IT as a part and parcel of the milieu
Changes are an outcome of complex subtle interactions among people, process, products and places. Hence the stated goal of a change activity may turn out to be very different from the outcome. Owing to employee inertia towards change, the all-expensive and prestigious implementation of Information Technology may be reduced to a mere fa硤e, if there exists a communication gap in the management?s objective of introducing IT and the employees? motive of adopting IT. Observations show that in many organizations the presence of IT has been seen as means of additional task rather than as facilitators of task. The ability of an organisation to thus tackle the change exercise decides the success of the change exercise.
Hidden costs
A one-time investment in technology upgradations has been by far the trend of any new technology in the market. However in the fast changing world of information technology, obsolesce is a word that one hears as soon as one feels settled with the new technology. Implementation of IT as a one-time investment could thus be one of the major myths. As time progresses IT implementation becomes very demanding in terms of large-scale maintenance costs called upgradation costs. These are costs that are inevitable, for if the organization can?t bear upgradation costs then it has to consider its investment in IT as sunk and non-retrievable cost.
Thus in this cut throat competition Caveat Emptor! The swoosh may be hip and trendy, but calls for thinking before you ?Just Do IT!?

Based on students? project report of the course MBA611- Organization Structure and Design.