CIOs have full agendas over
the next few years, transforming their companies into agile,
customer-centric organizations. But before IT can embrace its heady
future, it will have to get over its past, and rise out of the rut
grooved in by its history. As CIO Michael Hugos explains:
“For the past 20 years or more, people in IT have
dreaded questions like, “Yes, but what about this?” or, “Can your
system handle that?” Those comments always focus on exceptions to the
general rules that a system is built to handle. Often, they can stop
new system development projects dead in their tracks.
“Fear of these questions causes IT people to add
complexity and expense to otherwise simple systems in order to handle
exceptions that happen only once in a while.” – Agility Is First and Foremost a Frame of Mind
IT has several tasks in front of it, the
closest to home of which is to slim down its own development processes
and then to rearchitect its computing environment for greater agility
in purely technical terms. As McKinsey finds in its paper Applying lean to application development and maintenance, there are fat margins to trim:
- Exhibit
1: The time-tested principles of lean manufacturing can be applied to
rooting out and eliminating waste from the application-development and
maintenance production process.
- Exhibit 2: Companies can reduce application-development and maintenance costs by up to 40 percent.
- Exhibit
3: An analysis of the steps in the application-development process
reveals opportunities for improving productivity by up to 50 percent.
However, James Taylor reworks McKinsey’s conclusions into a more uprooting plan:
“The core to all this is to find the decisions made
in your applications and automate them explicitly as decision services
(there’s more here on decision services) while bringing business users
into the process so they can collaborate on developing new and changed
solutions. Lean processes will help, but you need to revisit the basic
assumption that writing code is going to work for you here.” – Lean application development and maintenance – some thoughts
But as we’ve said a time or two
before, IT’s task goes far beyond technical implementation, and
embraces its own and its organization’s change of culture: IT becomes a
business, enterprise processes become driven by technology.
The
opportunity and challenge facing technologists today is to realize that
essentially all business process is now aided by technology, even to
the highest levels of strategic planning. The role of technology is
increasingly symbiotic with the role of human judgment and thinking.
Thus it is that the constituency of IT embraces all the decision points
of the whole enterprise, and the presence of the CIO is really everywhere.
CIOs need to retrain and enlarge the scope of their thinking to match the scale of the CEO. It is not an exaggeration to say that CIOs should become visionary.
As Michael Hugos says,
“IT is not a cost center; it’s the engine that drives the agile
enterprise at the dawn of the 21st Century.” We give Hugos the last word here, from his Frame of Mind article quoted earlier. He’s describing what
happens as IT changes the architecture of the enterprise to more
permeable and elastic configurations.
“These wins happen because simple, stable and
scalable systems hum away in the background, handling more and more of
the routine transactions. That frees up people to focus on the
non-routine and to find the profit opportunities that are hidden there.
This is how agile IT helps companies thrive.” – Agility Is First and Foremost a Frame of Mind
