The Path of Least Resistance

As everybody probably knows, electricity flows through the path of least resistance. Well generally people do as well!

Surprised? Probably not right? I'm sure you can think of your own examples where you take the easy way out which may or may not have negative consequences later.

So what is (IT) upper management thinking...

We have all these lengthy procedures and "paperwork" needed to get things done. But a bigger issue is the software used to do all this is buggy, slow, and not intuitive...

And surprisingly, we brought these from vendors... using (a lot of) money! If these targeted consumers, i.e people buying iPhones, I'm pretty sure they would be out of business by now.

As a developer, I like building programs that make doing things intuitive and easier... not harder. At the very least they should fix this yet upper management takes no feedback from users and the vendors never do anything on their own... Other then maybe update a picture somewhere or add a note that says their program is incompatible with Chrome.

So here's some questions I want to really ask these guys…

• Why do we buy software that looks like they were built and last updated in 1990? 
• More importantly do you think people will do the right things if doing the right things to perfection is so unnecessarily difficult?
• Why are there systems that seem to trap useful data without any good ways of getting it out (data silos)?
• If developers have to spend all their energy dealing with these clunky applications and manually transferring the data out of them, how much innovation do you think we will do?

And lastly... It's already hard to get most people innovating or to do the right things, so why are you making it harder?