“Powerpoint makes us stupid.”
That’s what General James N. Mattis, Joint Forces Commander in Afghanistan has to say about the Microsoft presentation software. The Daily Mail reports that many in the military agree with Mattis. Another general, Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, banned the software while on duty in Iraq, saying “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” he told the New York Times. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
I’ve believed for a long time that another commonly used Microsoft product, Project, a project management tool, is just as bad. The software forces project managers to fit their projects into an artificial paradigm at the core of the software that is created by software engineers. This paradigm is based on the thinking of software engineers instead of project managers but forces the latter to conform the engineer’s idea of what good project management requires instead of the other way around.
Similarly, my examination of electronic health records (EHR or electronic medical records EMR) systems finds that many of the systems are not organically derived from the practice of medicine but are built around accounting or database requirements, with the needs of medical professionals only added later. This creates software that a software engineer or account might feel comfortable with and intuitively understand, but that feels clunky and counter-intuitive to a medical professional.
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