Let us be clear: there are plenty of times when experience is vital, and valuable. No matter how much theory is digested, there is often no substitute for having actually done something for a while to optimise an outcome. Or at least make sure that complete disaster is averted: looking up at the summit of Snowdon on a bright warm morning can lead the newbie to potter off in a pair of flipflops, unaware of what can happen. In the enterprise, key processes rarely flow exactly as the manual states they should (even if there is a manual, which is a rarity). The departure of so many 50-somethings into early retirement has contributed to much grinding of corporate cogs as their combined nous disappeared off to the golf course.
There is, however, another way of looking at all of this, particularly from where we sit. First (and it's a theme we keep coming back to), firms rely far too much on an informal network of experienced people and a bundle of spreadsheets , and far too little on building a coherent information set that can be queried independently and flexibly. Maureen, the amazing management accountant, can always be relied on to produce those sales figures for each month's management meeting. How does she reconcile the figures from the Hungarian subsidiary, and normalise those from the recent acquisition? No one is completely sure, but everyone is super grateful. They have same report each month that is consistent and looks good. Sitting in a meeting and wondering whether there is a corelation between an ad campaign and a product's sales, split by territory? Let's look at that at the next meeting. In a month's time. If Maureen is around.
Second, given the speed of the technology revolution, experience can be positively unhelpful. Even if the aforementioned firm has a Damascene conversion and asks the IT department to build a properly organised information store that is accessible by all that need it (including channel partners), those they ask are often burdened by their experience, not buoyed by it. Having been brought up on a diet of servers, a Network (with a capital N), firewalls and IP addresses, they go about buying and/or building an asset that can be added to the balance sheet, much like you might a building. If they get the approval to spend the ferocious amount (the reason why Maureen still exists), forests will be felled in a desire to appear all over it, approaching the issues from first principles, as if there had never been quite this problem in the history of the world. The solution will appear (eventually), over budget and solving last year's problems. The huge capex will gently be depreciated away, with a whole bunch of future liabilities added to the P&L: servers to be patched, outsourced configurators of firewalls paid handsomely to maintain the rules for all the channel partners to access data, of course with fixed IP addresses to ensure "top" security into the Network. Meanwhile, Maureen steams on unperturbed.
To use the easily accessible modern world of cloud technology you don't need an experienced individual as the technology was only released recently, so nobody in the world has that experience. The paradigm we all grew up with regarding the recruitment of experienced people is no longer applicable... Indeed you could argue that the opposite is true; to utilise these incredibly powerful modern services you need to be super curious and hungry to experiment with services that were only released last week, last month, this year... nobody has the experience, yet millions of people are adopting those services right now and solving their business needs in minutes for pennies.
Unmarked by experience, Miriam joins the Accounting Team as a grad. At University she read English, and was used to logging into a web page to interact with her tutors, and used Microsoft Lists to maintain the details of the College hockey group she was secretary to - everyone had access, and could update their details for availability etc. She wondered why it was so difficult in the "sophisticated" world of the adult enterprise - why not spin up an instance of Power BI management reporting (which the firm already licenced, but was lying around) and use it to bring the flat spreadsheets to life? Why, after a couple of days with youtube, can't we pull those data into a few simple database tables (again, using stuff already licenced and lying around) and spin up an app for all those (internal and external) who legitimately need it? Why not indeed.
Experience counts as a blocker on a number of levels. First, it prevents the storied IT professional from getting beyond the asset -perimeter-Network paradigm to the service - user world that is so compelling now. Second, it prevents the business understanding that such web services can be procured and managed without recourse to people trained in ASP.net. Lastly, dear old Miriam is unlikely to exist in real life as she sees herself as thoughtful and sensitive, not a geek. We all need to reinvent ourselves.