I must admit that it wasn’t hard to believe it last week when the Ebola mix up in Dallas was blamed on an IT system.  I took it a little personally.  Just another failure for my profession.  Another Obamacare.  Another Mars lander.  Another example proving the too easy case that IT projects fail at an alarming rate.  I was even contemplating a blog about this Ebola failure proving, yet again, the sad success rate of our systems… when it turned out it wasn’t true.  Not even a little bit.  It turned out to be a human communication error.

And, it reminded me that sometimes, perhaps many times, technology is blamed for failure when something else may be at fault.  Perhaps our associates didn’t leave us because they hated our website, perhaps they left because they couldn’t earn a living on the margins we were paying them.  Perhaps the outage we had last month isn’t the cause of our lagging sales, but is instead caused by stale content that didn’t inspire customers to come back.  Perhaps we are sometimes too quick to blame the technology or the IT guys for failures elsewhere.