Just Enough Technology Should Be Your Goal

Billions of lines of code delighted us in their utility, or vexed us with their complexity. Information technology went from not mattering, to mattering, to not mattering again in the famous Nicholas Carr article (and later book) of 2003.

Software doesn't write itself. Jobs and everyone else had to buy or build a set of tools, painstakingly, over many years, to get to the point where the complex could be made simpler. An iPhone has more parts than we can imagine. But development tools built every piece of that software.

As health leaders, you understand that if you don't understand the technology, you must make sure you hire and trust someone who does.

The best of you are constantly figuring out where too much technology is slowing things down, and trying like heck to do something about it.

That's easier said than done. Once legacy systems get their hooks into your business processes, every upgrade feels like the weight of the world, and changing systems completely is so daunting that it's a rare event. Making disparate systems talk to each other is incredibly challenging.

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