Let's Acknowledge "Practices"

I was reviewing some documentation about Information Management governance today and came across that ubiquitous people-->process-->technology model again. When I see it, regardless of its flavour, I always reflect on the way we approach organizational change, in particular change driven / enabled by technology, with an underlying presumption of a completely "engineerable" end to end solution.

There seems to be a regular failure to acknowledge that "people exercise free will as they see fit, in all circumstances." Knowledge workers in particular make hundreds of micro-decisions on a daily basis. Their attention, time, support, contributions and even compliance with changes to how work is done, when there is latitude for discretion, can only be volunteered. This means clear direction, encouragement and support at a wide variety of levels are required vs. an expectation that either staff will "do what they are told" or that they simply need options other than compliance removed.

So let's start using a people-->practice-->process-->technology model so we can accomodate the human factor, and acknowledge that not all work can be reduced to a series of detailed "must do" steps in a process flow chart.