School Transportation News Magazine | November 2009
[Analysis]
Confessions of a Software Developer: Technology Alone Can’t Bring You into the 21st Century By Michael C. Hinckley
Having spent the last 12 years attending
transportation trade shows, I have come to anticipate a familiar scene: up to our booth walks the owner of a bus company and his operations manager. Te opera- tions manager has been with the compa- ny for two and a half years, and from day one on the job has been pleading with the owner to “get the technology we need to bring us to the 21st century.” Teir com- pany has done well, but they believe they have opportunities to expand by purchas- ing a neighboring bus company, and bid- ding for new work with a more distant but potentially lucrative school district. With
rising prices for gas and buses, getting “lean and mean” to compete in today’s school transportation world means “tak- ing the plunge” and making a sweeping implementation of technology to maxi- mize resources and allow the company to scale to larger horizons. Before they leave, there are always two
questions: “How much does something like this cost?” And then there’s the in- teresting one: “How long would it take us to get up and running?” Over the last few years, my answer to the second question has changed dramatically. I used to respond as though the time-
frame related entirely to the software and training: “Oh, a week or two at the most.” In the last couple of years, I have learned that a good implementation should take much longer: “Tree to six months before you are completely functional.” When I see the raised eyebrows and startled ex- pressions, I am forced to explain the new variable that accounts for this longer im- plementation strategy. It will take several weeks to learn how the software works to adjust workflow processes and customize reports to make the most of a new system. In the landmark book “Good To Great”
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about successful business practices, busi- ness guru Jim Collins devotes an entire chap- ter to the role of technology in the great companies that were studied. Te results of the study showed that: “Te good-to-great companies used technology as an accelera- tor of momentum, not a creator of it. None of the good-to-great companies began their transformations with pioneering technol- ogy, yet they all became pioneers in the ap- plication of technology once they grasped how it fit…You could have taken the exact same leading-edge technologies pioneered at the good-to-great companies and hand- ed them to their direct comparisons for free, and the comparisons still would have failed to produce anywhere near the same results.”
For too many companies, implement-
ing software means bringing the software to the workplace and attempting to shoe- horn current practices into the software. In this way, the software simply provides a different platform for employees to do what they have always done. In fact, our most successful installations involve com- panies that use this moment of change as an inflection point to review all the work- flow processes of each employee affected by the change. Such a comprehensive and meticulous review is probably more important to improving the efficiency of the company than the technology itself. Without it, the technology implementa- tion will be seen as a “magic bullet,” which is sure to disappoint as it merely enshrines digitally the inefficient workflow process- es which were previously limited to pencil and paper (or an older software platform). Tis review is very simple, yet challeng-
ing. Te simplicity is evident in the single question that must be repeated through- out the review: “Why do we do things the way we do?” Te truth is, whether a company is
transporting passengers, selling software or building motorcycles, we have all de- veloped many practices that were the re- sult of personal preferences of employees (some of whom may not even work for us any longer), the specialized needs of a certain client, or the limitations of an old software platform. Many times, the com- plex processes that a central employee has developed to successfully tackle each day’s challenges would be nearly impos- sible for someone new to succeed with should the swine flu render the local ex- pert unavailable for a month. Te challenging part of the review is
overcoming the defensiveness we all feel when we are asked, “Why do YOU do things the way YOU do?” Having visited hundreds of transportation departments
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