#10 - David Lavenda - On empowering people to be at their best by eliminating information overload

My guest on this week’s podcast is David Lavenda, co-founder and vice-president of product strategy and marketing at Harmon.ie. He’s a veteran high-tech marketing and product strategy executive. He’s also a regular contributor to Fast Company and CMSwire, Financial Times, Business Week, Entrepreneur and other leading press outlets. David has recently completed a graduate degree in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), investigating how information overload in organizations has evolved since the introduction of email.

Information overload is exactly the issue Harmon.ie is addressing. Harmon.ie believes that technology needs to serve humanity. In today’s ‘app economy,’ information workers access countless business apps daily to get work done. And that’s distracting. Because people don’t think in terms of apps – they think about topics like customers, products, and projects. Harmon.ie was founded to solve this.

That intrigued me, hence I invited David to my podcast. We explore the key question of how we can humanize technology to empower people and their ability to work together in a world where information overload is the norm. Here are some of David’s quotes:

“..we've become overwhelmed with technology. A lot of the Silicon Valley culture that's driving technology looks at technology for technology's sake.

The information is just coming fast and furious at people. It becomes extremely difficult for people to be able to focus on what they really care about, which are things like customers, prospects, projects, and services.

..we see that productivity is actually going down to a large degree because people are confused and overwhelmed and very difficult for them to see the information.

..A lot of the promise of the introduction of technology to boost productivity is not been realized, and that's the opportunity. The opportunity here is a quantum leap in how people interact with technology.

..Giving me that insight to move quickly isn't making me more productive by doing the task faster, but it is allowing me to actually see the big picture and take advantage of the opportunity.”

By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:

1. Why ISVs should make a considered effort to apply technology not just for technology's sake if they want their solutions to provide quantum impact.
2. Why the potential is really to take a new approach to how people interact with technology.
3. Why vendors have to participate in a multi-vendor / multi-cloud world in order to stay relevant.