Personal Perspective
Beyond Business Outcomes: My Interest in Technology That Makes a Difference
A technology project can be valuable to a business without yet making life better for the people it is meant to serve. I want to keep asking about both.
2 min read
I have spent enough time around technology to admire what it makes possible. I have also learned to be suspicious of the sentence ‘We can build that’ when nobody has asked who needs it and what it will change.
That question became more concrete for me in work touching healthcare, community services and sustainability. One health engagement concerned information for young people with congenital heart conditions as they moved from paediatric to adult care. In another, a food-bank network needed a platform that would support its work across organisations. In sustainability conversations, I saw how easily an attractive digital idea could get ahead of a difficult question about the underlying data and the action it would enable. These are examples of projects and conversations I worked around, not claims that I alone delivered a measured social outcome.
Loneliest Whale — original artwork by Srivatsan.
Each setting changed the questions I asked. In healthcare, can the person navigating care understand what happens next? In community services, does the technology help the people coordinating assistance, or simply create another layer of administration? In sustainability, what decision becomes possible because we have measured something—and who is responsible for making it?
Commercial discipline matters in this work. An organisation cannot keep a useful service alive on good intentions alone. The budget, the team’s capacity, the cost of maintenance and the conditions for adoption belong in the same conversation as the vision. I have sometimes seen people treat those questions as an interruption to purpose. To me, they are part of taking purpose seriously.
I am interested in healthcare, accessibility, education and sustainability because their stakes make the relationship between technology and people harder to ignore. But the same test applies to an enterprise workflow: who is this for, what choice will they be able to make, and how will we know if it helped?
Technology is the capability. Business value is necessary. The lives behind the use case are the reason I want to get the decision right.
About the author
Srivatsan Nemili Aravamudan
Enterprise customer and business transformation leader working at the intersection of technology, business strategy and customer relationships.
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Srivatsan Nemili Aravamudan
Customer Success, With Empathy.
Exploring the human side of customer success, enterprise technology and business transformation.
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