Scared IT-less

by Jeff Tash, ITscout

I recently had the privilege of meeting Nicholas Carr, author of that highly controversial Harvard Business Review article entitled “IT Doesn’t Matter.” I asked him what it felt like to be the IT industry’s equivalent of “Salman Rushdie.” I don’t think he was terribly amused. He’s recently turned his HBR article into a new full-fledged book. Who can blame him for wanting to profit from his Andy Warhol-ish fifteen minutes of fame?

Nicholas Carr asserts that IT has become a “commodity” because, as he says, it’s not possible for a company to sustain long-term competitive advantage based on technology. He recommends that when it comes to investing in technology, firms should “follow” rather than “lead.” Perhaps he’s correct. Still, I seriously doubt that the really tough issues challenging today’s CIOs revolve around IT becoming a commodity. Quite the contrary. I believe the main problem confronting IT these days is that there’s much too much “complexity.”

Confidence in IT has plummeted as the increase in IT complexity has skyrocketed. Personally, I wonder how many IT professionals are privately scared to death over just how much they don’t understand and how doubly afraid they are that others are going to find this out. I can’t even begin to imagine how non-IT business people are coping with today’s rampant, unrelenting rapid pace of technological change. I’d speculate there’s lots of superstitious management decision-making being practiced out there.

Increasingly today, IT purchase decisions are being made by non-IT business managers. Regardless, the CIO has the fiduciary responsibility of knowing what and where major IT investments are being made within the enterprise, and by whom.

Enterprise architecture strives to bridge the gap between business executives and technical experts. All too often, however, the value of enterprise architecture is dependent on the actualization of a massive effort to comprehensively account for all technology implementation and usage within an organization -- and then to tie that to the critical business drivers in order to maximize the value of IT utilization while at the same time minimizing IT costs. It’s a long, complex, ambitious quest with little, if any, tangible reward prior to completion. Perhaps that why, according to META Group, sixty percent of Global 2000 organizations have yet to implement enterprise architecture.

Some people mistakenly think that enterprise architecture has to be an “all or nothing” proposition. Successful companies, however, prefer to approach enterprise architecture incrementally, where value increases and risk decreases at each stage of development. They start with a targeted, short-term, simple, inexpensive, low risk project that will generate quick results. How? By initially focusing on “terrain.”

An architect designing a house starts by examining the existing terrain upon which the building will be constructed. For IT, the equivalent is providing a foundation for enterprise architecture. This process begins by analyzing the existing IT environment. It’s critical that enterprise architects understand what they have to work with, not simply what they want as a final result.

A large number of IT organizations have found it extremely helpful to describe their enterprise architecture terrain by creating a picture -- literally a cognitive roadmap -- that visually organizes all of the hardware and software products that their enterprise has already purchased. Another way to phrase this is that “a picture can be worth a thousand products.” Why is this important? Because it’s imperative to ensure that non-technical business users and IT technical experts share a common view of their common terrain. In other words, before investing in any new IT product, both the business sponsor who’s paying the bill as well as the IT professional who’s implementing the system must understand what is being bought, and why.

I’ve spent the better part of the past decade developing a “picture” that captures the entirety of IT. At the bottom rests a graphical representation of IT Infrastructure consisting of clientware, middleware, serverware, manageware and platforms. In my visual depiction of IT, applications sit above infrastructure. Applications can either be built (Application Development) or bought (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Applications). Atop the applications layer in my graphical representation of IT is positioned Business Intelligence reflecting how applications generate data to be mined, queried, or reported.

Collectively, IT Infrastructure, Application Development, COTS Applications, and BI combine to form a single image depicting an organization’s IT terrain. You can view my IT “roadmaps” online by visiting www.ITscout.org.