Data, Technology and Tools - Why You Shouldn't Focus on Them

Shiny object syndrome. Said to be a continual state of distraction where you're always focused on the latest and greatest (roughly).
Humans love the new thing. Fun, exciting, could be the next 'big thing' and may be the solution to ALL your problems. Likelihood: it's not.

Elon himself said that "... the true problem, true difficulty, and where the greatest potential is - is building the machine that makes the machine (at least in his cases). It's building the factory."

We fall prey to this in data and technology so often, particularly in building, but we don't often focus on how we do those things, which are the things that matter. This includes the Process, People and the Operations by which we put everything into place and deploy. Clear measurement and monitoring, lowering error rates, and ensuring that there is a well-designed and effective collaboration.

On the people side, I think this is evidently needing improvement in many organizations where all the orgs are so siloed that each internal customer/user often is looking to get their own work somewhat organized, the team organized and on the same page with tooling, that it rarely funnels up to a cohesive process. Each team has a cycle/process so they can operate at their own respective cadence. It's not an accident that startups move faster - smaller teams can be working on a process from the outset that works for them, the sooner it's siloed without organization, the faster it descends into less collaboration.

I fear that the technology and toolings that have arisen of even just the last year around ChatGPT and no/low-code is something that will not create great processes but merely a chaotic compilation of tools where a design/engineer/product-focused team will have to ask "how does this fit?" far too often. Or, why was this not thought about previously when there are existing tools/operations/processes in place to do much of what they've done - it was without the cache. Who knows?

Hopefully if you're reading this, you aren't stuck in something at the bottom, mired in chaos of managers pushing tooling/technology down, and the idea would be to put into action once you've had a chance to organize how this factory and process will proceed from - certainly not one where you jump from tech to tech as it improves. But, let me know! Good luck.