Having worked for over 16 years’ in the engineering sector, and specifically within the technology departments of large engineering companies, I see a similar trend occurring over and over. Engineers are generally analytical people, they are usefully very clever and think of things in a logically manner. They also tend to have a character trait of wanting to do how something works and if they don’t they’ll find out.
What’s this got to do with technology? Well everything. The number of spreadsheets, databases, applications, macros that I’ve seen over the years’ that are homegrown and self built by an engineer with a technical problem is astounding. In my opinion it’s absolutely fantastic and shows innovation at its very best.
However it is also a point of tension.
As an example: On many occasions the engineer has developed something that’ll do the job they need it to do and it works well. At the same time the corporation has also identified the same problem and instructed their corporate IT team to go off and solve the problem. This is where the tension occurs. In 99 out of 100 cases the corporate solution won’t do the job as well as the engineer’s home grown application. It’ll do 80% of it but fall short.
There are a number of reasons for this that I’ve seen.
– The IT team not asking the engineer what is required
– The Engineer not being able to explain the exact requirements and therefore a critical component is missed
– A different engineer, with different requirements, was asked what is required
– The Engineer having a different requirement to management
All of these are regular occurrences and reduce the effectiveness of technology.
How do you solve this problem? In short, you can’t. There will always be different requirements and different needs that will never 100% match. However, you can ensure that there is communication and a good understanding of the engineering (or end user requirements). These two points are so often missed and what was a good corporate idea suddenly becomes a large waste of time and resources.
At HDB Associates we have the expertise to alleviate these issues. We understand both sides and have vast experience in working with both technology teams and engineers.