Or: “How come you can’t just write some soft­ware to do this thingy that I want with­out always want­ing to know why I want the thingy?”

Excel­lent ques­tion! I’m glad you asked.

Soft­ware can be very com­plex. And the process of design­ing and devel­op­ing new soft­ware is also com­plex. Projects can be eas­ily side­tracked. And I’ve got lots of expe­ri­ence at get­ting side­tracked! So much so that the Metrex team for­bids me to develop soft­ware any more – aren’t they sweet? But how does that fit into the orig­i­nal question?

Let me give you a sim­ple anal­ogy. One day, your car stops dead in the mid­dle of the road. You have it towed to a repair cen­ter and tell the mechanic “please put in a new engine”. The mechanic gives you a quote for the new engine and tells you to come back in a week to pickup the car. You come back a week later and the car’s ready to go. Just before you’re about to drive out, the mechanic tells you that the replace­ment went really smoothly but dang it if they didn’t get con­fused when they tried to start the car and it wouldn’t start because there was no gas in the tank! Well, you’re feel­ing a lit­tle sheep­ish now and per­haps a lit­tle embar­rassed when you real­ize that the rea­son you asked  the mechanic to replace the engine was because the car had run out of gas.

Does this seem a lit­tle con­trived to you? Of course! No-one would go to a mechanic and ask to have the engine replaced just because they ran out of gas! Who­ever heard of such a thing?! Unfor­tu­nately, in the tech­nol­ogy indus­try, this hap­pens all too often. As I said ear­lier, soft­ware can be very com­plex. Not only is the soft­ware itself com­plex but the human inter­ac­tions that depend on soft­ware can be very com­plex. Any change made to a sys­tem of processes and inter­con­nec­tions invari­ably has unforseen effects. These unex­pected changes can be good and bad. So when we ask “why”, we’re not just being obsti­nate. Under­stand­ing the busi­ness goals should be a pri­mary goal of any tech­nol­ogy project and if your tech­nol­ogy provider isn’t ask­ing you why, per­haps you should be ask­ing them “why not?”