On technology and cultural change
Authors: Michael Wing
Year: 2009

Stringer argues that every IT project requires 2 distinct efforts: project development and organizational change. Convincing an organization to change involves training people to use new technologies, reassigning workloads, moving people to new positions, and resetting expectations, effectively driving change in the culture of the organization. These tasks resemble human resources more than project management. Culture cannot be mandated in the same way as projects, because it is fraught with politics and fashion. Organizational change consultants run events like brown-bag lunches to sell the new vision of the organization. I believe that Stringer’s observations can be expanded to shed light on the nature of successful SE projects. Technologists usually seem to think of culture as a marketing issue, but it is more significant than that. All great software affects culture. All great apps change society. Office suites and search engines have changed the way that everyone creates and shares information and are now key elements of communication. Video games and social networking sites strive to change the ways we play and spend leisure time. Even embedded apps and device drivers (like anti-lock breaks) allow people to take things for granted that they used to do the hard way, allowing us to drive and fly more safely, efficiently, and confidently, which changes the choices that we make. In a similar way, all successful software tools and practices change the culture of SE. Compilers and IDEs that implement refactoring dramatically change the ways that developers think of and create code. Pair programming promotes cross training and the sharing of their ideas, experiences, and skills. TDD, which puts quality up front in the coding process, frees developers to make bigger changes with confidence. Culture includes the ways that we live and work and play and our collective expectations. I suspect that all successful technologies affect culture. If an app doesn’t change culture (in at least a small way), then in due time users will lose interest and it will fall out of fashion and fade into obscurity. Besides, what is the point of applying a new technology to keep everything else exactly the same? Improvements that don’t affect culture are doomed in the long run. For many decades, SEs have talked about users as stakeholders and have asked for their input on function and usability, which are concrete and specific. Ideally, SE would define success in terms of organizational or cultural change. Unfortunately, SEs have little control over users or their culture, so that standard of success would be unrealistic. Stringer argues that project managers must work with organizational change personnel, if they want their projects to succeed in the real world. Although, most engineers are good at absorbing change, managers and researchers can’t just command that practitioners adopt specific practices or tools. Whining won’t change culture. One solution is to work with technology evangelists. Are you responding to your environment, or the other way around? Is your culture evolving to match the influence of technology? Those who use technology to change their culture can thrive. Those who seek to dominate technology can stumble. Shaw isn’t entirely right. The ways we live and work must adapt to the technologies around us to glean their benefits.