Marketing / Operations
Is IT still relevant?
- 20th February
- Graham Oakes 9
Not according to some people. Graham Oakes postulates on the future of the IT department in a world where everybody’s gone digital.
Marketing teams point at their mobile strategy, their apps, their social media, and explain that this is all beyond the ken of IT. They have their own private pools of developers to do it all. Likewise for internal collaboration: files are shared and messages exchanged via assorted clandestine online services, with no involvement from IT. And, from the other direction, agile software development gurus have begun to question the value of a department that sets itself aside from “the Business”.
So why do organisations still have IT departments?
They’re generally not happy with these departments. They complain about the costs. They complain about the service levels. They often like the individuals they deal with, but hate the attitude of the overall department – too focused on processes and policies, lacking in human warmth.
Why do they tolerate this beast within their midst?
As a broad generalisation, IT departments do three things:
1) They feed and water the machinery. We’re now scarily dependent on the servers, networks and other kit that IT operates and maintains.
2) They help people use the arcane interfaces presented by the applications that run on top of that machinery. This is where the helpdesk spends most of its time.
3) They build and integrate new applications. Any “spare” resource left over goes into this.
Those who foresee IT’s imminent demise point out that (1) it is becoming less important – eventually the wonderful cloud gods will do it all. (Overlook the fact that these gods are IT people. They’re hidden in the cloud, so we don’t need to interact with them.)
Likewise, they tap on their iPads and explain the wonders of “consumerisation”. Apps that can be used without three tiers of helpdesk support have finally evolved. The IT helpdesk has been supplanted by decent design.
As for application development: IT is so slow we’ve started doing it ourselves. Hence those private pools of developers.
This misses one important point. IT clearly is changing. Infrastructure has become a commodity, a good candidate for outsourcing. (Although most organisations underestimate the expertise needed to manage even the best outsourcing partners.) Standards of device and application design have improved dramatically. (Or maybe we’ve finally bred a generation who is comfortable with technology?)
But application development and integration is a much deeper issue.
Most private development pools only skim over the surface of application development. Their apps and sites are fine – usable and capable of rapid evolution. But their integration with corporate “systems of record” is generally weak to non-existent. Because integration is hard: it has to deal with years of embedded history, complex regulatory requirements, overlapping product lines, and so on. And it has to do this in the face of rapid ongoing change within each individual application.
Yet getting this integration right is key to sustained competitive advantage. Few organisations can run without their commodity infrastructure, but commodities are available to everyone: they give no competitive advantage. Likewise, apps that can be evolved rapidly can be copied rapidly. The only way to get real advantage from technology is by integrating apps into the fabric of the organisation, and by using the resultant insight and capabilities to drive new organisational behaviours.
So we need someone to take responsibility for understanding the diverse mix of applications and devices running across the organisation. Someone to take responsibility for weaving these applications into a coherent whole. Someone to extract and integrate the data from these applications and turn it into meaningful information. Someone to facilitate people across the organisation to understand this information and use it to develop new products and capabilities.
IT could be that someone. It understands the technology. It touches every part of the organisation. It’s in all the right places. But can it deal with the messiness – both human and technical – that this diverse set of systems, data and people inherently brings? Locking down diversity through policies and standards, often IT’s preferred strategy, doesn’t add value in this situation. Value comes from engaging vigorously with the diversity that the world brings and helping the organisation to make the most of it.
If IT fails to do this, if it sits behind its firewalls chanting verses from the ITIL, then it will be outsourced. We need firewalls. ITIL contains a lot of sound advice. But real value lies elsewhere.
This is where I think effective IT departments are going – they’re becoming the team that integrates the activities of diverse people, from across the organisation and from beyond its ever more porous boundaries.
Is that where your IT is focused?
