What are we doing?
Today I had the opportunity to present at the National Computing Center Think Tank. The NCC have a fantastic remit to bring together practitioners from the private and public sector to explore the current realities. Add to this the vendor invitations where folks like me can share our observations with no axe to sell, and it makes for a really great discussion. Awesome stuff.
Prior to this invitation I prepared two documents. First I wrote a blunt paper based on my observations and feedback via Twitter. Second I wrote a Prezi for that to share the findings in ten pieces.
- Get the paper IT Departments and the Collapse of the Silo.
- Get the presentation IT Departments and the Collapse of the Silo.
I did this as part of an experiment to see what I could learn via you, Dear Reader, via Twitter.
I found out some amazing things as you will read in the attached documents:
- Silos are tribes with good features and bad. They are human evolutions of Division of Labour. The more opaque the walls, the more tribal the knowledge, the worse that IT will be.
- IT and Silos are under attack from customers (give me more for less), from Staff (everyone hates me, and I hate my job), and from Vendors (I want to eat your breakfast and your supper, but you keep your lunch).
The clear message is that change is happening, it is painful, it is variable, and in the IT Professional’s view it is better to be rushing for a different train instead of staying on the same one.
One comment from an attendee that “vendors lie to you” was something I personally found difficult: just like I’m a football fan but not a hooligan, I’m a responsible vendor and I want to do business when it makes sense and when my customers are successful. No doubt there are bad sales people like there are bad customers.
I feel like I’ve learned a lot through this exercise and I am indebted to the many wonderfully smart people who took the time to read my draft paper and email me their feedback: your honest responses amazed me!
No related posts.
Great blog Steve – glad you enjoyed the session and hope to see you at the next (topic to be determined).
Silo competency is not business competency: Business thinking is like a credit card, the idea is instantly satisfying while IT is like saving and taking a responsible action. Business should be thinking ahead, not reacting in real time with IT. Remember the MIT missile hunting problems of WWII? Artillerymen were shooting behind the missiles because they hadn’t thought to lead them sufficiently to actually shoot them down. Simple stuff. But that’s how business needs to start thinking, ‘How do I prevent an impact?’, not, ‘How do I react to an impact?’. This comes from one of two ways, technology gets an R&D budget in an organization, or, business plans at a 24 month rolling lead in Opex increases and 18 months in capital expenditures. If the ‘new’ thinking of the current MBA’s paid attention, they would have seen that a 12 month budget started becoming a zero-day budget right around 1995. It’s no wonder consumers bought into it completely by the early 2000′s and we had this massive dump in the later decade… but I digress.
Prebuilt appliances have better support: Disagree. While appliances are typically thought of as a physical-logical stew, a technology soft-stack represents an appliance as well. This paradigm will be next when we get into full on Cloud Euphoria following the last 24 months of edge-bleeding(darn vampires). That said, a fine example is Oracle. The top tier of support is so small and the lack of knowledge in the lower tiers is so massive that a real problem, something not solved by reading documentation, can very rarely be answered.
Capex to Opex shift: This is a five to 15 year old concept and companies promoting that now are just as far behind as those outsourcing/vendor-sourcing (on or offshore). Tracking down poly-experts and then spending effort to retain them, with poly-drones (light work, multi-disciplinarians) is the answer. Making people a part of a company is better than using an artificial motivator, money, to increase the customer service level for a business.
IT Managers should become skilled in vendor management: Perhaps the lunacy of this idea doesn’t strike you yet. You want viscous couplings, not conversion couplings. Take the example of a meeting between IT and business. With an extremely good PM, there is no IT representation but that person. But, on an overwhelming average, an engineer is in a meeting, breaking their workflow, reducing their learning, and reducing the ‘boring’ work they can pursue. If you insist on outsourcing/vendor-sourcing, the engineer gets to crack the whip and they get to listen. A procurement office should design the contract, and then the vendor engineers are the spotlight that the full-time engineer can point wherever. This ‘vendor slavery’ is a joke and most IT management should be laughed out of their offices for the amount of marketing fluff they buy into. In any case, this leads to your ‘DCE’ note.
You are spot on with DCE’s. A DCE is exactly what should be expected of a project manager 100% of the time; A strong enough poly-tech expert that can run a meeting (lead) without requiring engineering input because they already have it. This role is more important than a CTO and should exist as an IT gladiator and business solution…er that adds people based on project load. The person should probably retain a VP level business person to get from them the goals of the company 24-60 months out(12-48 months in pre-1995 parlance). This person is the viscous coupling. All are checkers with the DCE being the hand that moves them.
There are a few fundamentals of human evolution that haven’t been considered in this document and its myriad metaphors. To avoid being even more tedious, tribes are good. They are solid units of trust that communicate with a common language but retain small sizes, below 120-150 members and have constant interaction. IT functions with a person being a silo themselves as a natural fallout of specialization. IE, ‘Jim makes great hammers for meat. Even if that isn’t his competency, let’s all buy meat hammers from Jim’. Thus improving Jim’s skill. Or in IT, ‘Siva has a really patient tone. Even if he isn’t really a Windows guy, let’s use him for Windows problems’ Thus improving Siva’s skill.
Man, do I wish there was a big group of people to talk about these things with instead of the blog, comment, get ignored process.