Trillions Spent, Still Failing: Why IT Needs Human-Centered Thinking

Despite decades of methodological advances and trillions of dollars in global investment, IT system developments, operations and modernizations continue to fail at remarkably consistent rates. This talk argues that these failures are not primarily technical, but systemic, arising from a persistent neglect of human-centered engineering. Risk increases as software systems grow in complexity. Humans lose insight into their operation, their ability to control them decreases, as does the time to react relative to system behavior. Automation, while reducing routine workload, often exacerbates this problem by magnifying rare, but high-consequence failures. AI will exacerbate the inherent automation paradox problem in novel ways. The presentation calls for an honest, professional reassessment of how we design, evaluate, and govern IT systems—treating human cognitive limits as priority engineering constraints rather than afterthoughts.
Speaker(s): Robert N. Charette
Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/531602