Just as the modern corporation
must evolve to survive in today’s rapidly changing world, so too must
its IT department reinvent itself, or be swept away as irrelevant by
the swift tides of technological innovation. The good news is twofold:
stakeholders in the enterprise want IT to take more of a guiding role
in development; and the direction is clearly defined.
“In today’s sluggish economy, companies are demanding
that IT organizations make efficient investments and demonstrate IT’s
value to the business. They want proof of this value in the form of
business metrics rather than traditional IT measurements such as uptime
and throughput.” – How to run IT like a business
But IT will make a huge error if it believes
that today’s pressures for change center on cutting costs. Instead, the
overarching need for the enterprise now is wise investment in its
technological growth. The C-level suite wants the future direction
shown in terms it can understand intimately; in a way, this is an
increased measure of belief in IT.
“The only major difference between IT and a typical
business is that instead of revenue going in and profit coming out, IT
receives funding and delivers value, says Meta Group Executive Vice
President Howard Rubin.” – What It Means to Run IT Like a Business
While all of this may sound cut and dried in
theory, the practical details of undertaking change within
institutional dynamics are a minefield. In fact, how well IT
departments and their parent corporations change and adapt to the
future will be an indication of how mature and skilled their
executives, managers, and fundamental culture are. No one says it will
be easy.
Of the competing dynamics within the enterprise, sometimes IT is ready to lead the way, and faces its greatest difficulties selling its ideas to the business layer. This is crucial since projects will tend to fail without ownership at the C-level.
Conversely,
IT itself can be resistant to change, while the executive layer becomes
increasingly pressured to create technological agility. Enterprise
architect Mike Kavis has a series running at ITtoolbox on how to
transform your IT department into a business-worthy venture. Having
introduced the topic and given aids to change management, he goes on to demolish the arguments for inertia.
“What are some of the most common phrases you hear
when attempting to promote change within your organization? The top one
I hear is ‘I don’t have time’, followed by ‘I don’t have money’,
followed by ‘I need more resources’. These are the biggest cop outs in
the world. The reason why nobody has time, money, or resources is
because they don’t put any initiatives in place that allow them to do
anything other then put fires out.” – Are you running IT like it’s your business?
We know that businesses fail to transform
themselves, fail to provide true customer service, fail to adapt to
changing market conditions, and perhaps in the end simply fail. The
failures here all lie within the executive layer, nothing short of this
can be blamed. Bringing system, feedback, and minute accountability to
the processes of running a company, instead of relying on personality
and unchallengeable judgment, is part of the daunting task of
enterprise architecture (EA).
The four different views of the
enterprise architect are business, data, applications, and technology
architecture. Part of the goal of enterprise architecture is to
make IT more efficient.
Enterprise architect Nick Malik
has been developing his ideas for bringing agility to the business
processes, as well as to the application stack. He notes
that the “folks in IT often understand the business much better than
the policy teams in the business itself” and he advocates a stronger
role for IT to play in the decision-making and planning culture.
Commentators talk about the necessity and speculate on the means for an alignment between IT and business, and Malik is developing a “solution domain”model that measures and displays alignment across the enterprise.
So
the task for IT is to step up, and the means are becoming increasingly
available. It may even be in some cases that IT is the only force
capable of breaking through dysfunctions in the executive layer, and
giving the enterprise a future.
