Problems? What Problems?
(Today’s target audience: CEOs, COOs, CFOs.)
For those of you who came in late, WITDW is all about what’s
wrong with Information Technology in the Fortune 500. There seems to be a
consensual fantasy at the executive level that IT is going along as well as can
be expected, that progress is being made. But if you ask among your top
technologists, they will tell you that, like the Emperor in the fable, that
enterprise IT has no clothes. Corporate applications costing tens of millions of
dollars either fail completely or, when delivered, do not operate well and
almost always compromise the integrity of vital data. In many ways they are
inferior to applications built twenty years ago, albeit with prettier GUIs.
Why is this? I’ve offered a couple of major premises to get us
started: Despite, and to an extent, because of, advances in the technology,
enterprise IT is extremely hard – harder than ever. Holistic solutions are the
only workable approach, but the complexity overwhelms typical IT management who
respond with piecemeal approaches. Vision and problem solving must begin at the
top, with your CIO, the very guy who I will suggest elsewhere (metaphorically, I
think) deserves to be shot, at least based on his performance to date.
Is it the end of the world then? No. I promised that together
we’d solve your organizational and cultural problems first and then segue into
strategic technology issues and alternatives. So at the outset WITDW will be
targeted at CEOs, COOs, CFOs, and the like: people who hire and direct Chief
Information Officers. During this interval your senior technologists will just
read along and nod knowingly, pleased that I am unmasking the gaffes of
pointy-haired senior management. Then as I turn to the cases of technology
foul-ups that the Chief Architects, CTOs, and Directors of Application
Development should have avoided, they’ll notice the brogan is now on the
alternate extremity.
So, I think nobody in IT is doing their job, right? No, that’s
not really it. Over my 38 years in the business, I’ve observed that the roots of
many IT failures are in the areas of communication, coordination, and
commitment, to be alliterative.
These are problems with people and organizations working
together. Hence the call for a holistic approach, which must be initiated and
fostered by the senior IT officer of your enterprise, usually your CIO. He or she first must ensure that the business and IT interact
optimally, which does not mean that IT says ‘yes’ to everything, and also does
not mean that IT does what it damn well pleases (ah, those were the days, my
friend).
Equally important, the CIO must ensure that the isolated
mountaintop monasteries housing the cloistered technology sects are unified
under a single religion. (I’ll explore in a future column whom the god of that
religion should be. And, no, it’s not Bill Gates. I think it would be a demotion
for him in any case. Or perhaps he’d just be changing sides…)
But back to the topic, finally: Your company has really big IT
problems. If you are already aware of this, either you are smart or your CIO has
been upfront with you. Or maybe you actually talk to your customers, users, or IT staffers
occasionally. You can skip the rest of the column and go home ten minutes early
today. See you next week.
Still here? OK, let’s name some of your IT problems. Like some
strange hybrid of The Magnificent Carnac, The Amazing Kreskin, and The Expensive
Consultant, I will divine these problems without any previous knowledge of your
business!
- The time to market for new or enhanced applications is an
impediment to pursuit of new business opportunities. Half of your
applications never reach production.
- Information currency and accuracy are seriously affected
by lack of integration across applications. (E.g., you probably have ten or
more “Customer” files with inconsistent data.)
- When you finally roll out a new application, it has
serious performance and scalability problems. It probably has reliability
problems as well. And a lot of the business function is deferred.
- You are wasting 20-80% of your hardware budget due to
inadequate application architecture and implementation processes.
- You spend 30-60% of your staffing budget on contractors
and consultants because you have failed to hire and develop top notch staff
internally. HR says your pay scales are competitive but you still can’t hire
the ‘impact players’ who will change the game.
- You have significant attrition of your very best
technical staff, but the palookas and grunts stay on forever. They’re
pleased with their ‘competitive’ salary.
- You have many overlapping vendor products, hardware and
software, to perform similar functions, negatively impacting staffing
competence and flexibility as well as application integration.
- Lessons are not learned – similar mistakes are made
repeatedly with more creativity put into putting a positive spin on the
failures than into improving future outcomes.
- You have a bunch of guys writing papers and giving
seminars in a ‘Technology Futures’ or ‘Advanced Technology’ group but no one
actually envisioning, engineering, and building a coherent enterprise IT
environment. (This missing guy is the Chief Architect. We’ll hear a lot
about him in future columns.)
How’d I do? As well as CapGeminiErnstDeloitteAccenture, I’d
bet. To say nothing of some firms that can only afford three letters in their
names. I’ve identified some problems you already knew about, and a few you maybe
didn’t. If you concur, come back next week. If you don’t, make sure you visit
Tomorrowland next. You’ll see it on the left as you exit Fantasyland … |
