"I think IT projects are about supporting social systems-about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues"
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Berners-Lee quietly flips the usual autopsy of tech failure on its head. Instead of blaming buggy code or poor requirements, he frames IT projects as scaffolding for social systems: the messy, negotiated reality of how people coordinate work, trust data, interpret screens, and decide what counts as "done". The line is almost deceptively plain, but the subtext is pointed: computers are the easy part. The hard part is humans trying to use them together.
Calling IT "communications between people and machines" sounds neutral, yet it smuggles in a critique of technocratic fantasy. Many projects are sold as if software can overwrite politics: standardize a process, automate judgment, eliminate friction. Berners-Lee reminds us that every interface is a cultural interface. A dashboard encodes who gets visibility. A workflow encodes who gets to say no. A database schema encodes whose categories become real. When those choices collide with existing norms, status hierarchies, or informal workarounds, people don't "adopt" the system so much as resist, route around, or sabotage it quietly.
The context matters: this is the inventor of the Web, a tool designed less as a product than as a protocol for collaboration. His career is a case study in cultural adoption: open standards won not because they were elegant (they were), but because they aligned with academic sharing norms and later with commercial incentives. So when he says IT fails due to culture, it's not hand-wringing. It's a warning that the real integration work is social: incentives, training, governance, language, and the stories organizations tell about what technology is for.
Calling IT "communications between people and machines" sounds neutral, yet it smuggles in a critique of technocratic fantasy. Many projects are sold as if software can overwrite politics: standardize a process, automate judgment, eliminate friction. Berners-Lee reminds us that every interface is a cultural interface. A dashboard encodes who gets visibility. A workflow encodes who gets to say no. A database schema encodes whose categories become real. When those choices collide with existing norms, status hierarchies, or informal workarounds, people don't "adopt" the system so much as resist, route around, or sabotage it quietly.
The context matters: this is the inventor of the Web, a tool designed less as a product than as a protocol for collaboration. His career is a case study in cultural adoption: open standards won not because they were elegant (they were), but because they aligned with academic sharing norms and later with commercial incentives. So when he says IT fails due to culture, it's not hand-wringing. It's a warning that the real integration work is social: incentives, training, governance, language, and the stories organizations tell about what technology is for.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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