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Preventing the Demise of the IT Department
Document ID: ZAPFLASH-200957 | Document Type: ZapFlash
/By: Ronald Schmelzer/
Posted: May. 07, 2009
ZapThink has long championed the role of Information Technology (IT) and
the information technologists that turn IT resources into capabilities.
However, we are especially champions of the users of IT, notably the
business. After all, if it weren’t for business users, there would be
little funding and relevance for IT. Yet, we must distinguish between IT
and the IT organization within the enterprise. Whereas IT represents the
assets business wants to leverage, the IT department serves as an
organizational structure by which the IT needs of the business can be
met. Simply put, the IT department is a means to an end… or at least it
should be.
One of the frequently repeated complaints we’ve heard over our past nine
years is that the IT department is increasingly non-responsive to
changing business needs. Complexity, fragility, unpredictability, and
unreliability all conspire to turn even the simplest of business
requests for IT capabilities into a months-long, expenditure-heavy
activity. And until very recently, there was really very little that the
lines of business could do about that. Every business-IT interaction
becomes a negotiation, with business trying to wrangle as much
functionality as the time and budget would allow, and the IT department
trying to limit new requirements so as to maximize the impact on an
already over-stretched infrastructure.
As we discussed in our SOA: Enabling the Long Tail of IT ZapFlash
<http://t.ymlp178.com/umemarauqyaraeswqaiambmuu/click.php>, one of the
roles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is to change this sad
reality by enabling business user empowerment
<http://t.ymlp178.com/umejaxauqyadaeswqalambmuu/click.php> of a sort we
have not seen before. But, the purpose of this ZapFlash is not to
iterate again on that point. The main issue we are seeing now is that
far too many companies still see SOA as a luxury that they can afford to
postpone in tough economic times. Looming on the horizon, however, are a
variety of technology and cultural changes that are combining to force
rapid change in the IT industry. The amazing and rapid evolution of
online IT capabilities is now conspiring to put the very future of the
IT department in question as users become empowered to solve their own
problems without involving the IT department within the enterprise. As
we first stated in 2006, IT must Service-orient and empower their users
or be doomed <http://t.ymlp178.com/umebapauqyaiaeswqarambmuu/click.php>.
This is not hype or hyperbole -- this is now a reality for IT. Those
companies resisting SOA will undoubtedly put the nails in their own IT
coffins.
*“You, IT, are Competing with the Cloud”*
Last week, I recorded a podcast with Dana Gardner and a few other
notable analysts and experts as part of the thought-provoking Briefings
Direct series. In the podcast, which will be published in a few weeks, I
discussed that individuals now have so much capability available to them
through Web 2.0, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and Cloud-based
applications that they can not only develop significantly powerful
applications, but do so faster, with better quality, and less costly
than they can do so within their own IT departments
<http://t.ymlp178.com/umehazauqyaxaeswqaoambmuu/click.php>. In fact,
many of these web-based applications are targeted to relatively
non-sophisticated users with simple interfaces that empower users to
develop complex applications without having to know how to code. In that
podcast, I asked, “At what point does the line of business get
frustrated enough with the cost and complexity of their own IT
departments that they resolve their problems using capabilities outside
the network rather than inside. Is the IT department in danger of
becoming obsolete?”
To further reinforce that point, ZapThink recently attended two major
vendor events: IBM’s IMPACT 2009
<http://t.ymlp178.com/umewacauqyanaeswqaiambmuu/click.php> and Software
AG’s SOA Summit 2009
<http://t.ymlp178.com/umeqanauqyadaeswqafambmuu/click.php>, with
speakers that quite coincidentally echoed the above sentiment. At IBM’s
event, a number of speakers made the point that the potency provided by
Cloud Computing capabilities enables business users, not career
technologists, to develop very sophisticated applications at remarkably
low costs due to the pay-as-you-go model and virtualization of IT
resources. Even more remarkably, at Software AG’s SOA Summit, Kevin
Flowers, Director of Enabling Technology at Coca-Cola Enterprises stated
in stark terms that “you, IT, are competing with the Cloud.” What he
meant was that the “cloud” (which in his terms referred to the general
capabilities of Web 2.0, SaaS, and Cloud Computing
<http://t.ymlp178.com/umeyaaauqyadaeswqacambmuu/click.php> as a whole)
provided such tempting capabilities that if the IT department can’t rise
to the challenge and equally empower its users, the users will go
elsewhere to get their needs met at potentially greater quality, lesser
cost, and in shorter time.
*Enable User Empowerment … or your Users will go Elsewhere *
Now, this vision of the self-empowered business user is still a ways off
given security, privacy, and access to local data concerns, but these
challenges are purely technical. The real issue is an organizational
one: will a business audience already fed up with IT’s inability to meet
business imperatives authorize their non-IT users to get their needs met
by outside providers? If so, Cloud, SaaS, and Web 2.0 companies will
quickly rise to the challenge (and newfound revenue streams) and solve
the aforementioned technology challenges much faster than the IT
department can react to the threat. Therefore, it makes sense to revisit
two themes that are a persistent thread in ZapThink conversations: using
SOA as a means to enable business empowerment, and dealing with the
rapidly emerging “digital divide”.
On the first note, we must re-emphasize the point that it is not IT’s
role to own and manage the applications on behalf of the business.
Rather, its role is to enable business users to consume and compose a
wide array of Services that IT manages as simply as possible.
Enlightened IT organization should see emerging Web 2.0 / SaaS / Cloud
(“Cloud in the large”) capabilities offered by third-party vendors both
as a source of opportunities for Service deployment and consumption as
well as competition. Every evolution and advancement of the Cloud in the
large raises the bar for what is expected of internal IT capabilities.
To respond to this reality, the IT department must stop its incessant
focus on the “T” in information technology and redouble its efforts on
the “I” part. This means that the focus on abstract, easy-to-consume,
easy-to-compose Services is more important than ever and is the primary
goal of IT, rather than a nice-to-have addition.
In addition, we continue to remind companies that the IT experience that
their business people experience away from the office – on their
handheld devices, Internet browsing experience, and other devices – is
rapidly becoming more sophisticated and powerful than their enterprise
IT experience. This is the true “digital divide” that we often refer to
in our conversations with end users. Indeed, the enterprise IT
experience is downright embarrassing. Why is it that when we’re at home
we get the luxury of using apps as sophisticated as Facebook, iPhone,
Tivo, and Google Docs, while at work we have to suffer decades-old user
interfaces and frustratingly unproductive experiences? This rapidly
widening digital divide between the IT-at-home and the IT-at-work
experience is threatening to once and for all put IT on the
much-deserved defensive and justify its millions of dollars of
expenditure for systems that pale in usability comparison against those
that are either free or cost pennies on the enterprise IT expenditure
dollar.
*The ZapThink Take*
As Miko Matsumura, Deputy CTO of Software AG put it at Software AG’s SOA
Summit 2009, “evolution is about survival.” SOA, along with Cloud and
other emerging architectural approaches to agility, represent an
evolution in the way that users work with IT assets. But, the entire
purpose of evolution is to avoid a certain death. Organisms evolved to
deal with environmental realities that, without their evolution, would
have meant their extinction. Likewise, organizations need to evolve to
deal with the reality of the IT landscape that requires agility to avoid
a certain death. From this perspective, if the business finds that they
can get their IT needs met without the IT organization’s involvement,
the IT organization will die. IT without business support is an
impossibility.
Trying to avoid, deny, restrain, or otherwise negate the inexorable
march to Service-oriented, user empowered IT is an exercise in futility.
Those organizations that think they can successfully survive in this new
environment by canceling their SOA projects
<http://t.ymlp178.com/ummsacauqyadaeswqalambmuu/click.php> are stringing
their own nooses. CIOs who are so short-sighted to believe that the
business will accept the current inefficient, inflexible, expensive,
unreliable, and unpredictable IT systems of today while ignoring the
obvious alternatives should be strung up on the nooses they have set up
for themselves. While technology challenges remain to make the vision of
agility an uncontestable reality, technology challenges are the easiest
of all to solve. When the business begins to express their desires, will
the IT organization rise to the challenge or face inevitable demise?
<http://t.ymlp178.com/ummhaxauqyaoaeswqagambmuu/click.php>
<http://t.ymlp178.com/umwbadauqyagaeswqarambmuu/click.php>
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