There’s no such thing as a technology problem

The original draft of this post was written in 2022, at a moment when “big tech” was facing a reckoning. I didn’t find the opportunity to finish and publish it. Since then, my shift to a more information-oriented job has brought this topic into renewed focus for me. And big tech is still facing that reckoning. So I have revisited this old draft to get it into a publishable state. This explains why the references in this post might seem a little old.

When someone mentions information technology, what image pops into your head?

Searching for the term on a popular stock image website, I have been presented with images of monitors displaying code, computer chips, ethernet cables, and someone inspecting a server rack.

These images focus on the “technology” aspect of IT, not the “information” aspect of it.

Information is often the forgotten half in “information technology”.

With the increased availability of the internet in people’s homes in the 1990s, it was hailed as the “information superhighway”.

But over the decades, that information-focused future vision has slowly morphed to become a grey goo of “tech”.

The end of big tech

But the tech bubble has burst. A widely-shared article from the Atlantic in December 2022 began:

The dramatic, multidimensional implosion of Meta; the nuclear train wreck of Elon Musk’s Twitter; the momentous labour uprising against Amazon — it wasn’t just an unusually disastrous year for America’s biggest tech companies. It was a reckoning.

The article went on to cover a range of failings from the tech companies that have come to define our lives over the past two decades. While there is reason to be cynical about a media outlet’s complaints about tech companies (who have come to be the media’s competitors), this article resonated with people because this time it actually felt true.

And it’s not just US tech companies that have been struggling. Sweden’s Spotify has been every bit as implicated with making swingeing job cuts, while the economic winds change along with social attitudes towards big tech.

Meanwhile, web3, the nebulous concept of a crypto-centred future backed by some prominent tech figures, collapsed in spectacular fashion almost before it even got off the ground.

The value of NFTs plummeted more quickly than they rose. People’s fortunes disappeared in a puff of Ponzi smoke, and crypto has become a dirty word.

Web 2.0’s last breath

Even the last titans standing of the social-focused web 2.0, Twitter and Facebook, have had catastrophic times of late.

Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk for an inflated price that was literally a joke. Since then, it is argued that his approach to managing the platform has caused damage to his other business interests.

Elon Musk may have thought he was buying a tech company. But its users really saw it as a communication tool. This mismatch has opened the door to competitors like Mastodon and Bluesky.

As for Facebook, it bet on the metaverse so heavily that it even changed its name to Meta. Even leaving aside the fact that their technology has struggled to include legs on their avatars, Facebook’s metaverse vision lacks a compelling use case.

Most of their demos seem to consist of people conducting meetings at whiteboards in meeting rooms, and other mundane tasks. You don’t need the metaverse for that.

As Andy Polaine has noted, this is because Facebook seems to see virtual reality as a technology problem to be solved.

But people’s problems aren’t with the technology. They are typically with the content — the information.

Those diminishing the integrity of information

The information age originally brought great promise to society. But this new environment bred the tech bro. In previous decades these people may have become Wall Street bankers. These people saw in the internet an opportunity to exploit people for profit.

But as they attached themselves to tech, they drove the integrity of information into the ground, causing damage to society in the process. They moved fast, they broke things, they started to damage the world.

For the ones that recognise problems, they expect the solution to centre on more tech. They will be disappointed.

There are no tech companies

Dig beneath the surface of most firms described as a tech companies, particularly those formed since the invention of the web. You will see that they are not tech companies at all.

• Facebook is not a tech company, it is a media company.
• Amazon is not a tech company, it is a retail company.
• Netflix is not a tech company, it is a TV company.
• Google is not a tech company, it is an advertising company.

Technology may facilitate these companies to achieve their business goals. But in the end, technology is in service to more fundamental needs.

We don’t need more tech. What we need is a better understanding of humans. Because our problems aren’t technology problems. They are human problems.

Better technology through better humanity

The good news is that there is evidence that key players have started to recognise that to improve technology for humanity, we need to to understand people. An analysis of world university rankings has shown that some of the most prominent science, technology and engineering universities are now also world leaders in humanities.

The reason is an increasing recognition that technology and humanity are by necessity intertwined. Massachusetts Institute of Technology deans Agustín Rayo and Hashim Sarkis explained:

The insights of science and engineering are, of course, crucial to addressing many of the world’s most urgent problems. But science and engineering operate within human societies and serve the world best when informed by the cultural, political, spatial, and economic complexities of human existence and ways of inhabiting the earth.

Bearers of bad news

For some, this is not an appealing prospect. Humans are messy, and understanding them is even messier. It’s certainly a lot harder than piling new feature ideas onto a product backlog.

Sam Ladner, a sociologist working in tech, compared her role to the Greek myth of Cassandra, who warned that soldiers were inside the Trojan Horse. No-one believed her, she became an outcast, and ultimately she was murdered. But she was right.

Being a human-centred practitioner in a tech environment can sometimes feel like this. You can reveal the truth. But what if it is not what your colleagues want to hear?

If you are lucky, they may simply ignore it. If you are unlucky, your colleagues may shoot the messenger. Confirmation bias is powerful.

But organisations that won’t face the truth are doomed. Tech companies have been feeling that recently.

People just want their needs met

Blockbuster Video could have bought Netflix in 2000, but instead went bankrupt in 2010. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, but refused to pursue it because its business was selling film.

Most of us know these examples. But history is a wheel, so it needs repeating.

Like Wile E Coyote, these companies didn’t see themselves running off a cliff edge until it had already happened.

Right now, big tech companies are scuttling their feet and failing to find traction.

As I have written before, the technology turns out to be almost irrelevant:

People just want the most convenient way to meet their need. Fixating on technology makes [organisations] miss this simple idea.

The history of business is littered with firms that failed, because they failed to adapt, because they failed to understand people.

How to understand people better

Luckily, we have tools to connect organisations to the human needs they must serve. Carrying out research with people goes a long way.

But human-centred practitioners needn’t be mere bearers of bad news. There are ways we can make our insights speak to the needs of the business.

For example, the jobs to be done framework can help organisations break free of existing assumptions about human behaviour that just so happen to suit their current business models and technological capabilities. It can shine a light on new opportunities.

You can think in terms of pace layers to connect to the underlying needs that humans have. User stories connect our code to user needs. Jobs to be done connects those user needs to people’s real life goals.

Understanding more about people helps us adapt to what humanity really needs. Connecting that to our technological capabilities helps us make that a business success. That way organisations can avoid being tomorrow’s Blockbuster or Kodak — or Meta.