Herbjörn, I think that IT tried many times to get out from the shadow... and failed. The question is it is only IT fault? There is no doubts that IT has to do a a lot, but somebody (?) leaves IT with no funds and resources...
I agree with your questions to IT but think that Business has to start with itself. For example, why Business asks about something today and not 3 month before? Does Business really needs what it asks for or it is a 'wish' of a business manager? Does the Business know/has estimated the consequences of the change it asks for for the Business itself? IT will be in troubles all the time if it continues play a follower role. Business has to start treating IT as a partner to capitalize on the IT capabilities. This is not a theoretical statement; it directly correlates to the speed of changes Business has to accommodate with the help of IT. It is known fact that IT adopts changes 2-3 times slower than Business itself. That is, IT has to be able to observe directions and coming changes 2-3 times earlier than Business. It is impossible for a follower. Cloud does not help in this problem - changes in Cloud will go even slower due to separate organisational ownership. So, I think that IT is second in fault after Business. - Michael ________________________________ From: Herbjörn Wilhelmsen <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, May 9, 2009 1:49:15 PM Subject: Re: [service-orientated-architecture] Re: [ZapFlash] Preventing the Demise of the IT Department When IT cannot provide suitable solutions fast enough business people will get what they want elsewhere. This is true in our modern cloud- enabled world, it was also true before the cloud was worth its name. After a while business people will start asking IT some questions: How can we connect those two things together? Whatever happened to that information? Who wrote this? How can we limit access to that information? How can we use information in those three applications to make our decisions? How can we do our job without waiting for 45 minutes? How can I share a piece of this information with only those individuals that have this special relations to us? There is a term for this: Shadow IT. IT that grew in the shadow of the "real IT" - meaning that the IT department had no clue about it or at least no control over it. Shadow IT came about long before the cloud. IT must be prepared to solve two kinds of tasks: Create new functionality. Clean up the mess when business users shopped what they want and met with big trouble. IT will have a lot to do in the years to come.... /Herbjörn 2009/5/9 mikomatsumura <mikomatsumura@ yahoo.com> I'm always amused by how naive some IT people are about the agendas of various groups within the IT ecosystem. I think it's because IT people have a natural inclination to think of the problem from a technical perspective- -and thus think of the problem as one of (as Mr. Spock would say) "pure logic". Well, if you look at the large cost inefficiencies in IT, you can see how individual risks are being mitigated while Enterprise risk is sometimes increased--there are always these amazing and expensive large scale IT failures within which individual CYA (Cover Your umm Butt) behavior contributed significantly to raising the risk for the whole shooting match. In any event, I'm always amazed when internal IT people dont realize that their jobs are likely to be wholesale outsourced to big IT services companies/vendors and how little they understand the need to fight back. My 2 cents, Miko -- Med vänliga hälsningar Herbjörn Wilhelmsen
