GovernIT

Today has been a good “thinking” day for me so far. First, I read a great post by Peter Kratzman on Mending Wall: Matches and Mismatches in IT stakeholder expectations

Then I got to watch this great interview of Gartner’s Daryl Plummer on Youtube

While I agree and understand Business’ frustration with IT, there are a few things that make IT behave the way it does. It cannot be a coincidence that most IT shops behave this way, right?

Some thoughts:

• Do Less with More – Supporting the same or increasing number of applications with less personnel, less money, outsourcing headaches, at a time when costs are going up is forcing IT to think about survival and not about innovation! If you are firefighting everyday, where is the time to think long-term?
• Technology Innovation and Adoption cycles don’t match – While new mobile platforms can come up quickly, supporting them in the Enterprise is a nightmare with untried devices
• Security Risks are discounted – with the qualification that the discount is valid till a breach occurs. For example, giving mobile support to Enterprise applications seems the way to go, but supporting Blackberry, iPhone and Android phones increases security risks manifold. There is very less experience out there on how to do it safely. Social Media, Cloud Computing/SaaS,  Data Storage are some other examples where security breaches can cost the company dearly
• Business still does not want to “own” decisions concerning IT. Moving to the cloud vs staying in-house is not IT’s sole responsibility. After all, if IT systems are down, the Enterprise is down!. In short, Business must move away from the “Get IT done somehow and don’t tell me about it” (pun intended!) mindset
• Like Business, IT has some processes and while they can be flexible, there are some constraints. Everyone has to live with constraints these days, so why be unreasonable only towards IT?
• Finally, the most important thing (at least, it seems that way to me) – the thinking that IT is a magical system that can bend however needed while Business processes are fixed in stone must be changed. I am reminded of my teacher in school, who admonished me – It can be done as long as the doer is someone else. When you have to do something, you get all the problems in the world!

So, who will bell the cat? (That’s just a saying, don’t take it literally folks)

IT. We must do a better job at communicating these to the Business. Much has been said about how to align IT with Business, but how should this alignment happen? Some case studies are listed here.

• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s CIO does a good job of Governance in this CIO.com article
• This CIO’s team congregates to discuss every business project that has an IT component (I like that) – Read here
• This paper from SAP America discusses the challenges and offers some solutions (Needs free registration) – Link here

I wrote some shorter posts on this here and here last year, but this seems to be a perennial subject.

Do you have other things in defense of IT? Or are you, perhaps, from the Business? Me, you ask? I believe in this quote (I have quoted this earlier too on this blog):

None of you are in IT; all of you are in business.

-Andy Kyte, vice president and Gartner fellow

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