Software for people who like people

This blog is for people who are interested in software which can help people involved in managing something to better achieve their objectives.

Is this you?

Why are you interested in software?

Many people are interested in technology for technology’s sake. This sometimes seems to be the Google thinking. People who like technology being able to do something which it has never been able to do before.

Many people like social angles, like helping support democracy, or helping people learn, or manage some health issue – which are laudable aims even if software by itself doesn’t achieve much.

People in the business software arena are often interested in driving efficiencies and automating things. If it can be done cheaper and easier by a computer, let’s do it. Automation can put the computer in the heart of the company’s operation, managing supply chains,  transactions and data gathering.  Or perhaps they are interested in data entry and retrieval systems.

If someone is not managing anything, ie working on their own (like a graphic designer), they can probably easily find software which can do as much as software can.

But where the current software industry falls down is for people who need to manage something (where other people or companies are involved), including in security, policy, business management, financial management, assets, projects, customer service.

Many of the attempts to bring software into these sectors fail because people want to develop technology for technology’s sake, drive efficiencies, automate things or solve social problems.

It proves to be very hard to develop software which can help  people do things because it involves so much left brain + right brain together. Software people are usually good at left brain stuff – logic – but the people side of it can’t usually be solved by logic.

Even working out what someone’s specific objectives are involves a deep understanding of what they do, which is usually different to how you might think it is without asking them.

These points are important to stress because there is so much discussion right now about artificial intelligence and computers taking over people’s jobs. Computers are nowhere near being able to take over most people’s jobs, because the jobs involve understanding complex situations and computers can’t do that very well.

In the rare occasion where a job involves following specific steps then computers can do it. But that doesn’t apply in many cases, and normally it is the aspects of a job which don’t follow specific steps where you really need a computer – such as an airline check-in person facing an unusual request.