[Sigia-l] Business and decision drivers - was: IA and semiotics - and standards?

[Andrew]

Hi,

I think that this comes down to the Dune aphorism - "He that can destroy 
a thing, controls that thing".  Without being too cynical, I think that 
it is fair to say that a certain amount of this goes on in any 
medium-to-large enterprise - management through revenge, management 
through spite, management through ego gratification. Part of being a 
successful information support design/IA professional is selling a 
project in a way that it appears to serve the best interests of all 
concerned - which can be hard work sometimes :)

Has anyone ever done any serious research into the amount of 
people-years that are wasted every year in the business realm due to "my 
needs as a marketing/accounts/sales/whatever professional aren't being 
met (i.e. this does not adequately feed my illusion of control) so I 
will torpedo this project"?

It is something that has been said before - any technical problem can be 
reduced to a set of needs, wants, and wishes for some person or persons. 
Somewhere along the line, a human being makes decisions that some other 
human being may overturn for political or diplomatic reasons. Scary! :)

Cheers, Andrew

Listera wrote:

> <snip>
>
>Anecdote: A few years ago a very large corp paid me a huge sum to redesign
>an enterprise app that would be used by a few thousand people when fully
>deployed as version 1.0. For reasons too complicated to cite here, the 0.9
>(beta) version was already released when I got there and that's what I
>redesigned. The 0.9 version was demonstrably awful and was being used/tested
>by less than 100 users who complained in various degrees. A small group of
>unbelievably conservative but obviously powerful managers stopped the
>release of the redesigned version altogether by claiming that the very small
>number of (essentially) beta testers would be "inconvenienced." Apparently,
>thousands of others wouldn't matter, for years to come.
>
>Ziya
>Nullius in Verba 
>
>  
>