I recently came across more ammunition for my cause of organizational dynamics being the key to success in information technology projects. The evidence came in the form of 2005 Harvard Business School online piece on web services: "Confronting the Reality of Web Services". The piece is an interview with HBS professor Andrew McAfee and, in spite of being long-in-the-tooth in internet years, its fundamental point then holds perfectly today: web services can only help systems collaborate if people collaborate first.

At issue is data standards. McAfee says:

The organizational challenge comes as all stakeholders get together and hammer out common definitions. This might not seem like the kind of work that leads to disputes, but it is. In most companies, questions like the following would lead to heated discussions:

* Who's got the real customer contact information? Who gets to access it? Who gets to update it?
* What's the last day for bookings in each quarter? Is it the same all around the world?
* Do we have to do a credit check before scheduling every order for production?
* Who gets to certify approved vendors? What's the process for adding a vendor to the list?

Answering these requires a combination of diligence and tough-mindedness.

Thus an issue of passing data gets into much thornier issues of defining data and allow use of it. It is clear at this point that there are huge benefits to easier data sharing, but the costs of solving the hard questions still prevent many benefit from actually being realized. Appreciating the organizational dynamics at play is the first - and ultimately most critical - step.