Economy and IT

All the bad news about economic downturn got me thinking that there are a few parallels to be drawn between the cause and effect of current economic situation and IT. Just like American consumer, we have to start thinking about making some adjustments that will be required in future. Lets look at some of the parallels first:

Exotic instruments – One of the reasons financial system came crashing down was the invention of exotic financial instruments such as Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO), Credit Default Swap (CDS) etc. These instruments were not well understood by majority of people that were peddling it or those that bought into it. We in IT world have been living in alphabet soup of our own – EAI, AI, SOA, BPM, CEP etc. While some of these acronyms have legitimate meaning, most are there to sell products or consulting services. In financial world these instruments have led to illusion of profit thus fat bonuses for undeserving people. In IT world this has also led to fat profits or career advancement for undeserving people

Sub-Prime Mortgages – IT equivalent of sub prime mortgages is the foolish investments we have made over time in technologies that have failed to pay back (they are the financial world's equivalent of "Upside Down" mortgages). Now, any new technology investment is risky and we should not be totally risk averse otherwise we will miss the opportunity to take advantage of transformative technologies such as the Internet, but at the same time we in IT tend to over hype any thing new. "If only I go ahead and buy a new CRM package, I will have better customer relationship." I am sure every organization has a number of expensive software products that have either been abandoned or are under utilized.

Next time I will talk about the adjustments. Anyone here with me for a “BAILOUT”?

Ashok Kumar

Key Learnings: Overcoming IT obstacle

I used to get offended whenever anyone stated that IT was an obstacle for Business, most probably because of I have been part of IT twice in my career. After giving this some thought following are some of the approaches IT could take to overcome this perception.

Business and LOB-IT agree to adopt agile, i.e. a small joint team of IT and business to rapidly deploy applications. IT Operations object and demand that the team follow the traditional application life cycle (at least for the releases) so that they can meet the business SLAs.

• This may make sense for transactional systems that are business critical - but then again, if managed right even such applications could be deployed using the agile approach. One potential approach would be to provide a dedicated set of environment (including in production) and/or include IT operations in the agile team. This enables them to rapidly deploy new capabilities every few week.

A small business team developed or procured an applications which suddenly gains a lot of momentum within the enterprise. As IT was not involved in any of the decision making, it refuses to supporting or maintain the application stating that it may not have the skill set, resources and/or the ability to support it. This frustrates the business as they see this as IT slowing down innovation.

• IT should work with business to find a solution. Couple of options include - outsources the maintenance to a third party (including hosting servers outside the IT's data center) OR IT provides only lights-on SLA for such applications.

Business comes to LOB-IT requesting a data mart - basically extract some key information from multiple systems for reporting purposes. IT comes back with a huge proposal that includes procuring hardware, reporting tool licenses, support headcount, etc. a number that business definitely cannot afford.

• Observed this across multiple large enterprises - business extract the data from sources and sends it to a third party (small business) who have the expertise to create the custom reports as well as support the business. IT needs to figure out a ways to support such business needs - otherwise, it risks being irrelevant for rapidly developing custom reports for the business.

Business is interested in rapidly rolling out a business capability with a time frame and budget in mind. IT comes back with traditional approach of selecting and deploying packaged applications with both an unacceptable time frame and budget.

• Work with business to identify a SaaS provider and either pull all the data in periodically or identify and develop the integration between the SaaS provide and the exiting enterprise applications.

These are just some examples - additional anecdotes are welcome.