We've moved to meaningbit.com

The Psychology for IT Pros blog has moved to a new home at www.meaningbit.com/blog - head there for more on happiness, technology, and everything in between.

There's a whole load of exciting stuff planned, including new podcasts, so please check it out. Thanks for your support so far!

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The automation blues

I've noticed an interesting paradox. Many of us get into IT because we're excited by new, cutting-edge technology, and yet as a profession we can be extremely resistant to change. The extent differs from person to person, and between organisations, but it's a theme pretty much everywhere. Even in the most cutting-edge startup, there's an engineer who'll tell anyone who'll listen that things all started to go wrong with that release a few months ago. This can become a real problem both for individuals and for whole organisations, as change is inevitable and is the only way to take advantage of new opportunities. Resistance to change is rooted in fear. By overcoming that fear, particularly when related to automation, and by embracing change, you and your organisation can be happier and more productive. Change resistance There are many ways people can hinder change. It can take the form of direct challenges; for those in authority it could be the refusal of chan...

Conway's Law and more

Conway's Law states that "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure." It was first posited by Melvin Conway in the 1960s, and it's a hard constraint on software, networks, and other formal technical systems. What it says is that code is generated by human systems, and these limit how it will work. All software contains the same patterns and relationships that exist within the social systems of the organisation that created it. There's now good empirical support for the hypothesis, too with a paper published the Harvard Business Review finding that closed-source software produced in a single location tends towards a single, monolithic codebase, whereas distributed open-source projects tend towards modularity. Large organisations typically have support structures around those actually producing code or designing systems. There's management, proce...

Technology in Education - podcast

I recently had a very interesting discussion with Andy Davis of Venturi about the role of technology in Higher Education and its effects on students, staff, and on the challenges the sector faces. Do check it out, particularly if you work in education or the third sector.

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