The Real Reasons Why Digital Projects Fail
Danae Diaz/Ikon Images It’s a familiar scenario: An organization implements digital tools intended to improve a particular process but fails to obtain the desired result. Employees who are meant to use them complain that the tools don’t solve the problem or that they add inefficiencies. Managers who investigate problems with the tools chalk the failure […]
Danae Diaz of Ikon Images notes that digital tools intended to enhance organizational processes often fail to deliver the expected outcomes. Employees report that these tools either don’t solve their problems or introduce new inefficiencies. When managers investigate these issues, they often attribute the failure to poor adoption, overlooking the distinct factors of data quality and system usability.
Research conducted across a cognitively demanding field, such as clinical medicine, reveals that data usability and system usability operate through different mechanisms and fail in different ways. Improving data quality without addressing system design can lead to increased germane cognitive load, enhancing decision quality, but it also increases extraneous cognitive load due to poor system design.
Conversely, investing in system usability without improving data quality may reduce extraneous cognitive load but fails to trigger the necessary conditions for good decision-making if the data is flawed. This distinction is crucial, as diagnosing the real cause of digital project failures allows for targeted corrective investments, ultimately improving decision quality without increasing overall cognitive burden.
Written by urgent.news from MIT Sloan's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
