The most interesting people are not the ones that tap you on theshoulder and say “well done”, but the ones that challenge the wholefundament of your ideas. Following up on my blog post “Divide and conquer to solve the business-IT disconnect problem“, @thesiteman challenges my post and asks:
My question to him is “How come we’re not asking IT to change?” Why is that we’re asking them to stay in their silo? Isn’t that exactly what enterprise 2.0 is trying to eradicate? If we’re look at thebusiness side to be agile why are we not requiring the same from IT? Why do we think that IT can not be flexible?
Well, I can only say that @thesitemanis completely right. What we would like to see is that the corporate ITdepartment is as flexible and as agile as the business side. Why? Forthe fundamental reason that IT is there in the first place to ENABLEthe business to do their job, preferably in a faster, cheaper andperhaps different way than without IT. That is a very important pointthat a lot of people seem to forget.
In defense of the corporate IT department
Taking in account one of the challenges that Social Business Design has identified, I still stand with my post:
New trends, no matter how revolutionary, must still overcome thelimitations of the past before becoming fully adopted. Inorganizations, legacy systems and platforms, cultural elements, andgovernance requirements all work to limit the willingness to experimentand innovate. In order to meet these looming challenges, businessesneed to fully understand the legacy structures in place within anorganization and determine how to leverage these structures whileimplementing new processes to improve results.
So, while the ideal scenario is that the corporate IT department isvery flexible and agile, the CIO has certain challenges to overcomefirst. Think about large legacy systems (e.g. old mainframes), multipleERP instances across several business units (if you are lucky they arefrom the same vendor), a plethora of vendors and platforms, etc. Onething I want to emphasize again and again to frustrated business unitleaders: this is NOT because corporate IT department leads are notdoing a good job. This situation happens naturally in almost everylarge global company that is the result of mergers and acquisitions andthat is old enough to drag legacy systems with it. Knowing that thereare often hundreds of man-years and tens of millions of investments inthere, you are not talking about a greenfield scenario.
If you are the CIO of a large global company that suffers from theabove scenario, you will consolidate the different core ERP systems,you will reduce platforms and you will define a uniform IT strategythat aligns all efforts, architecture and development. Not because thatis so much fun (although I know people that utterly enjoy this), butyou need to have these things figured out before you can fully supportthe business in their operations.
To give an example: if you are a large group company and each of thefive business units have their own ERP system (not all the samevendor), how quickly do you think that you can get insight in whathappens in the group? Most likely you’ll have to wait a couple of weeksto get the numbers from the previous quarter because they all need torun reports, align the results and consolidate it. In nowadays’economy, what you really want is real-time integrated businessintelligence. With a snap of your finger, you want to get insight inwhat happens now, not what happened 2 months ago.
Reconnecting Business with IT
Obviously, the show must go on. The company must bring new productsto the market, the sales force must sell more and costs must bereduced. Since we can’t stop the operations of the company for threeyears, we need to find a temporary solution that allows gradual changeof the IT landscape while keep on delivering value-added services tothe business units.
In my previous postI have mainly focused on the reason why we should transform the ITdepartment from a solutions provider to a solutions enabler, withoutgoing deeper in how we are going to reconnect the two. We need anapproach for our IT and business architecture that allows evolutionarychange in both the technical side of the organisation, as well assupporting changing culture and processes.
The way we are going to reconnect the business with the corporate ITdepartment is a very well known problem pattern identified in theRussian problem solving thought framework TRIZ.Principle 24 tackles the problem where two surfaces are meeting witheach other, causing an undesirable (or harmful) situation. TRIZsuggests introducing an intermediary material between the two surfaces.Think about shaving: you’re using shaving soap as an intermediarybetween your skin and the blades to smoothen the experience.
If we consider the business units as one surface and the corporateIT department as another surface, what will the intermediary materialbe?
Allowing gradual change
Besides breaking down internal silos, corporate networks mustincorporate previously external nodes as contributing participants aswell. The technology required to support this network must operate asa platform delivering what is necessary and relevant for nodes toperform and progress towards business goals. (Social Business Design for Workforce Collaboration)
This platform, or the “intermediary material” as described in TRIZ,will be implemented along the principles of Service-OrientedArchitecture (SOA). The huge data silos that are present in the companycontain a vast amount of data, together with the corresponding businesslogic for safeguarding data consistency. However, the problem is thatwe don’t get enough value out of these systems, so let’s open up thesesystems through services or APIs. The end-goal is of course tooptimally support the business user in their daily work, so theuser-centric applications (like an iPhone app, a customised SharePointpage, a widget in Jive SBS, …) will tap into the services or APIsfrom the back-end systems.
In order to keep this all a bit manageable, we will need to take care of the following:
- Gradually disconnect the user-facing applications from theback-end data silos and introduce a middleware layer that acts as thehub between the user-facing applications and the back-end data silos.
- Anticipatechanging processes: using Business Process Management systems we candynamically (re)configure processes between user-facing applicationsand back-end data silos
- Focus on identity management andsecurity: you will need a smart identity management solution forSingle-Sign On across all the applications and a strong security modelto control access to your precious data services / APIs
The added benefit that this approach gives us, is the fact that wedon’t need an overnight big bang implementation. By ensuring that thereis no tight integration of user-facing applications, business processesand back-end data systems, we have now an IT landscape that allowsgradual c
hange in order to reach one day the much-desired “agileenterprise” that we are all dreaming of…
Lee. it’s not just M&A, but also IT who have reacted quickly and thrown up an application to support a business problem or Shadow IT grown out of a division/department – again to support a business problem that has gone from short term to business critical. We can’t complain about this – at the time it was right for the business.
More often than not, its quicker to do this than change the mainframe or core ERP/CRM apps and comply with the rigorous release cycles of 3, 6 and 9 months – with stacks of changes building up to go into the next release.
Additionally and as a result of this, we are not typically starting with a blank canvass. As the old joke goes – it only took God 7 days to build the world as he didn’t have a user base!
We don’t often have the luxury of a Greenfield site. We do have to piece things together – if we did I don’t think this problem would exist or perhaps it would not be as bad.
I also don’t believe the pace of change between business & IT will ever be aligned, one will always play catch up to the other and no guesses as to which one will make the demands and who will have to play catch-up! So with this in mind, we have to find a new way to help smooth the way between the two differing requirements.
Lee, well put…I am glad we can have a conversation/debate of this sort…and I look forward to your future articles.
Some good points in your blog post indicating a significant change that is occurring in enterprise IT departments and the constant pull-pull between business management and IT – how do the two work together to help the organization continue to be competitive on so many different technology fronts.
Another perspective that could be an easier one to digest is this. With SOA services so prevalent and IT department so strapped it seems to me IT departments are moving toward being SOA brokers and this needs to be more fully acknowledged. IT departments are under this constant scrutiny of what have you done us lately. There is no way they can build out and run the entire scope of infrastructure requirements for business groups anymore. You do what makes good business sense internally and these days you outsource more more of the business requirements to SOA vendors.
But if you do that what is your real value anymore of a growing majority of the services are outsourced in a Web 2.0 (3.0) world? IT departments have to redefine their value by provide security inspects and reports of SOA from businesses wanting to provide SOA services, manage the SOA services for single sign on issues (as you mentioned) and spend more time looking ahead to be more anticipatory of what businesses need versus always running behind.
So how an IT group defines it’s value is changing is what underpins how agile then can be.
Tom
Hi Tom, yes I fully agree. I wrote about the topic of IT departments transforming from solutions providers to solutions enabler in a “previous life” http://www.capgemini.com/technology-blog/2009/04/it_department_from_solutions_p.php
Nigel, thanks for the nice build up.
I agree with your first point, and even more I want to ask everyone to stop blaming each other or pointing fingers. certain decisions that might sound now wrong, were often a good call back then. also everyone knows the pressure of delivering fast and cutting corners, so we can’t always follow the ideal textbook scenario
some of my next posts will look more closely to the challenge of transforming your IT landscape while keeping a live system up in the air, and on top of that: getting more value out of it.
One very interesting article, shared with me by Peter Evans-Greenwood touches the same topic but further explains the different pulse that business and technology are operating: http://peter.evans-greenwood.com/2009/06/22/why-we-cant-keep-up/
Must read!
Hiya,
(http://peter.evans-greenwood.com/2009/11/26/the-price-of-regret/)
@nigel & @lee You’re not talking about the reget cost?
@lee Glad you liked to the post
r.
PEG