The Practitioner´s Cycles, Part 1: Actual World Problems

This is one of two essays on the forces and constraints of procurement versus the goals of human centering, including the creation of intelligent technologies that are usable, useful, and understandable. The procurement process tends to de-emphasize these goals while focusing on strict adherence to rules and regulations. As a result, software system development processes, described in texts and acquisition documents, have come to be misaligned with the challenges faced by development teams. This misalignment between "actual world problems" and normative documentation repeatedly results in failed systems. A real-life practitioner\´s account illustrates this point by describing how a group of individuals, acting on their own initiative and at their own risk, short-circuited the rules and constraints of the procurement process to turn a procurement process failure into a success. In the next essay, we will present a model called the Practitioner\´s Cycles and discuss how this model applies to the envisioned world problem, which is the challenge of creating intelligent technologies for new work systems.