Limitations
The Framework | Knowledge areas | Processes | Limitations

IMBOK breaks a complex domain down into five areas where we need specific knowledge, and then sees the four transitions from each to the next in terms of process.  Organising the issues in such a simplistic way might be misleading. Real life is not simple, and the tendency of "IT people" to try and reduce complexity by reduction - evident for many years now - masks some of the unexpected connections that might exist outside the simple view that is presented. 

For example, if in an organisation the chief executive officer decides that it is necessary to introduce workflow systems, and to eliminate all paperwork, then there can be no doubt that the workforce at all levels will set about exactly that, whatever their misgivings. What readers of this text might find is that there is too little attention to the soft issues: the attitudes that people adopt, the cultural factors that colour everything that goes on in a business, and the relationships between people that so often override pure logic.

In a recent conversation with Professor Chris Edwards at the Cranfield School of Management in the UK (where some of the ideas presented here originated), he remarked that the issue of the moment is indeed culture: if an organisation has no cultural bias to embrace and adopt change, then investments related to change are doomed to difficulty, or even outright failure. However, if we are to avoid hopeless complexity we can only adopt one perspective at a time and the view presented here is relentlessly reductionist. It may be the product of a "left-brained" mind, but at least it gives us a comprehensible framework around which to debate our problems and to begin to organise the balance of our difficulties, however soft, people-related or cultural they may be.