Technology can't solve it all, sometimes! I wouldn't have said that few years back but as I progressed through my career and saw project after project and issue after issue I realized there will be instances where technology all by itself can't solve the entire business problem. We may have to come up with a process solution or an exception process to make the solution whole. It's difficult to admit it as a career technologist but that's the cold truth.
To give you an example, recently I ran in to a team which was trying to solve a business problem. To keep it high level, this team was trying to do some data processing based on a key match between a legacy system and a newer web based system. The team comprised of seasoned and dedicated technologists. They were able to find the match for 99.95% of the records but they were not able to match on 0.05% of the records. So, they kept breaking their heads and tried many different routes to get to 100% match and on the way burnt about 2 months and put a multimillion dollar enterprise project at risk of missing schedule milestones. When few of us from outside of the team started engaging with this, we soon realized in a working session what was going on. When we analyzed the problem, it was truly a situation where technology can't solve the whole problem as the data itself was incorrect. The team was able to come up with an exception process to handle those 0.05% of the records and everything started humming again.
The reason I chose to write about this is to: 1. Admit that there are limits to what technology can solve, 2.So we all know that it is OK to come up with an exception process and not put the bigger objectives at risk for solving a small and impossible problem. Be smart and keep the eye on the prize!
