Good at One Thing Good at Everything?

How did we logically come to the conclusion if something or someone is good at one thing they will be good at everything. How many times in your career have you seen the promotion of the top technical resource that excelled to a management role over a team of technical resources? 

How many times has that been a success?

I do not want to suggest that they will never be successful, but if they are successful it is not because of their technical ability it is due to factors like communication, accountability, leadership. 

Those that rely on their technical skill tend to micromanage the team and fail to lead the team. 

So why do we do the same with software solutions?

I remember from my days in IT when we picked a very large ERP vendor as the ERP system, then it became the CIS system, then the GIS system, then the CMMS system. We spent years and millions to expand that well-performing ERP system into roles it had no business trying to perform. We then spent years and millions undoing this mess and finding appropriate solutions for appropriate roles.

So today I work where Operational Technology (OT) meets Informational Technology (IT) and I watch it happen again.

I see people turn to what they know and try to promote the technical resource to the management role. They have relied for 20+ years on their automation system and now think it should become the big data platform, IoT Platform, and the analytics platform. Now to be fair, there are very positive characteristics to these systems like reliability, resilience and complexity of control. These systems also have some challenges as they are proprietary, expensive, complex and lack the desire to share. 

So why do we think these systems should be promoted?

For one, the add-on data systems from these automation vendors are given away for free or for very little cost more times than not and we like free, we just forget that we get what we pay for.

These systems have no history of sharing (data access).

These systems have no history of playing well with others (integration)

These systems have no history with dealing in the past (data storage and retention).

These systems have no history in self-sufficiency (user-defined visualizations & analytics).

So why do we accept these promotions versus finding the right solution for the role?

We are at a stage in this OT/IT integration where we need to make sure we ask and answer the right questions and make the right choices. The amount of data we will be collecting with IoT, community and automation data will overwhelming.