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October 19, 2006
Pushing a Rope
Perhaps the most annoying characteristic of the IT industry is how relentlessly focused on the future the industry is. In some ways, this is good: we are constantly looking for ways to make life easier and to do things faster, better and cheaper. But there is a limit to our headlong rush: we are very often leaving our businesses behind.
The reality is, IT is not — or should not be — leading an organization unless that organization's core business is IT. IT organizations should be helping the business to advance by finding solutions to the business' problems. But this relentless future focus often puts us out in front, finding ways to incorporate emerging technologies into problems more to find a way to use the emerging technologies than because the business needs it. If you are asking, for example, how blogs can help your business, you are asking the wrong question. There are many questions to which blogs can be all or part of an answer (such as, how can I enable managers of plants on different continents to easily communicate their problems and collaborate to find solutions?), but blogs, and technologies in general, should never be the question.
We all seem to complain about managers who read a magazine article or see a vendor presentation, and then want to immediately deploy a technology into their organization without understanding it. In fact, Scott Adams has made himself a millionaire lampooning that very problem. Yet it seems just as prevalent that it is the IT people who are pushing technology on managers. And that is not unlike pushing a rope: it's very frustrating, and doesn't get you nearly as far as if the person on the other end of the rope is pulling.
Me? I'd be happier if more vendors could implement 10 year old technology well. One of my favorite ways of figuring out if I'm using good processes is to ask whether I would buy product X (where X is whatever my client produces) if it were made that way. If I were working for a financial services firm, for example, I would ask if their financial services would be better or worse using processes of the maturity and with similar outcomes to the way I make IT systems. If the answer is worse, or if I would not buy it knowing their processes, then it means I'm doing the wrong thing.
I wish more people would ask, and honestly answer, that question. And then do something about it. Instead, I spent a good chunk of my day today getting tasked with incorporating emerging technologies into our standard non-functional requirements for vendors. Heck, like I said, I'd be happy if they could do a better job with old technologies, and we'd get much more bang for the buck putting our money there.
Oh, well.
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Comments
Are you guest-writing for InformationWeek now? Or would you care to provide some interesting specifics?
*Of course* IT should be serving the needs of the business. Unfortunately, most businesses have the business problem-solving skills of the monkeys in the job search site ads.
How much better off would have certain companies have been if the IT guys had actually been running the real business? Probably not worse.
Posted by: queuno at October 19, 2006 10:06 PM
Hardly. But guess what kind of day I had at work...
Actually, I'm not really of the opinion that companies should be run by IT (unless they are explicitly IT-service companies), any more than that they should be run by lawyers or accountants (though most are). IT guys, much like lawyers and accountants and HR guys, are there to advise, not to run. The people who should be running the business are those that know its primary product.
What is really scary to me, though, is that American companies are the most efficient and effective in the world. Anyone who's worked in large American companies should rightfully be terrified by that statement.
Posted by: Jeff Medcalf at October 19, 2006 10:17 PM