Why "Running IT As a Business" Is a Bad Idea 364
snydeq sends along a provocative piece from Infoworld, arguing that the conventional wisdom on how IT should be run is all wrong. "Bob Lewis dispels the familiar litany that 'IT should be run as a business,' instead offering insights into what he is calling a 'guerilla movement' to reject conventional 'IT wisdom' and industry punditry in favor of what experience tells you will work in real organizations. 'When IT is a business, selling to its "internal customers," its principal product is software that "meets requirements." This all but ensures a less-than-optimal solution, lack of business ownership, and poor acceptance of the results,' Lewis writes. 'The alternatives begin with a radically different model of the relationship between IT and the rest of the business — that IT must be integrated into the heart of the enterprise, and everyone in IT must collaborate as a peer with those in the business who need what they do.' To do otherwise is a sure sign of numbered days for IT, according to Lewis. After all, the standard 'run IT as a business' model had its origins in the IT outsourcing industry, 'which has a vested interest in encouraging internal IT to eliminate everything that makes it more attractive than outside service providers.'"
Re:He is correct (Score:1, Informative)
He actually hit the nail to head with this. This is the thing most people working with IT or geeky professions miss, and why they think everything free and such is so great movement. Business DOES NOT work on mere technical things. Nothing in the world does.
This all can be really put into one line: People don't care what you do. People care about results of what you can enable them to do. If you provide that, great! If you dont and jab about "better ways" to do things while costing time and money, then.. sorry, but bye bye.
As a more slashdot friendlier terms, do you really care how a pizza place makes your pizza? No. You only care about how good it tastes when you eat it.
I like what you're saying, but the analogy is terrible. Yes I do care how my pizza is made, I no longer order from a certain place because they failed health inspections twice in a row, the second time with even MORE problems than the first. However their cheesestix are mighty tasty but I can't really bring myself to eat those anymore either.
Re:He is correct (Score:5, Informative)
Were you authorised to show these people CutePDF? Who gave you permission to to install CutePDF on their machines? Did you fully evaluate CutePDF to certify that it is the Best of Breed? Are their security implications to using CutePDF? Who is now responible for maintaining CutePDF? Who is going to train users on its use? Has it been fully documented? Are change control and the standard image build team aware of this?
In such environments it is much easier and healthier to just not care any more.... the above situation is not uncommon.
Re:He is correct (Score:5, Informative)
Re:He is correct (Score:5, Informative)
This occurred in the call center where a friend of mine works. Their clients only required a handful of calls to be recorded each month, so rather than invest in an expensive system to record everything, they do it by hand (they use Cisco Softphone, so it isn't as difficult as it sounds). They were going to purchase him a Creative sound card along with some crap Creative recording software. He asked if he could just use Audacity instead, since it is rock solid, he knows how to use it, and since it is under the GNU there aren't any legal issues. Their answer? Nope. Because it is open source, their IT department "determined" its use could lead to a security risk.
Sometimes, the asshole is puckered way too tight.
Re:Sounds like a cop-out for bad customer service (Score:5, Informative)
In olden days when I was a young IT pup, IT was generally considered to be a subsidiary of Finance, which made sense at the time since most computing was done to crunch numbers, so we worked for the number crunchers. Later, as IT evolved, it tended to stay under Finance because people who do inscrutable things are just seen as similar in the eyes of management. This led to serious conflicts as, say, order entry or inventory management wanted changes but all fell subservient to IT's overlords in Finance. Finance, understandably, didn't want to spend their budget supporting other department's goals.
Eventually, IT started either being broken out into subgroups and living with their business areas as scattered fiefdoms, or centralized and moved up the management chain so the CFO and CIO were on the same level. As this happens, managing the IT teams becomes a unique challenge, because IT is in so many ways integrated into all aspects of a company in ways that other organizations simply aren't. So you either have (potentially well-managed and aligned) fiefdoms that use different platforms that can't talk to each other, or you have a group that tries to meet everyone's needs with as few discrete solutions as possible and, at best, succeed partly at satisfying everyone.
Money spent on IT is almost always considered "lost revenue", and a holdback from the old Finance days of IT is that every department needs to justify its existence. Thus the chargeback model was born. So concepts like charging rent for floor space (forcing managers to vacate space that will never be occupied to save their "rent" costs, and cramming their people into spaces too small for them to work effectively) or finding a profit model for IT (forcing managers to forgo any systems changes that didn't actually save measurable amounts of money, even if the ideas really would help in the longer term) were born to try and force the idea of efficiency into each department.
Once you do that, you will always find that you can get a specific task done in the short term by hiring someone who can just solve the problem at hand without being bothered by all the consequences like incompatibility with existing processes and systems, long-term support costs, etc.
You'll also almost always find it's cheaper to do a crappy job on your project now while your expense code is on the line, and leave the cleanup to future projects who have to deal with it and spend more money to use what you've built (but it's on THEIR expense code).
Plus, of course, IT itself is given very finite resources at most companies (which is appropriate) and has to fulfill specific goals of the company to "earn" those resources (which is also appropriate).
But there's generally a lack of appreciation for the benefits that creative IT can bring to a company, so few companies give their IT staff much in the way of leeway to explore new technologies (outside those mentioned in CIO magazine and implemented "right away" with little input as to whether it's the right solution for any actual problem the company is facing, or even what the solution is meant to do, and most of those are explored by a consultant anyway).
Re:He is correct (Score:1, Informative)
Those are all the correct questions. You do not get to decide what goes on systems unless you are in a small shop and do all the support, because as you would know if you've put in any time in a large or medium business, some software causes problems.
If you've never been called in to troubleshoot a server issue at three am, only to find out someone was connected to the system with some off the wall bit of software, maybe something they brought in from home, maybe something you gave them because "what harm could it do", then you've still got IT dues to pay.
Re:Right idea, weird reasoning (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, I stumbled across that passage too, but you can understand what he's getting at if you strip out the buzzwords. What he's pointing out is that there's this mode of dealing with IT where businesses make requests on IT like, "Make a web app that do exactly this," and then the IT department goes about producing those regardless of whether it's the best solution to the problem. The IT department doesn't necessarily ever learn what it is that the business is trying to accomplish; all the IT department does is follow orders as though they're independent contractors and the rest of the business is a customer.
What he's suggesting instead is that the IT department takes the time to learn what it is that the business is trying to do and why and is involved in business discussions. From there, IT is in a position to help develop the business processes to be more efficient. If the IT management is working more directly with the other managers, then when the managers say, "I want a web app that does exactly this," then IT can say, "Actually you don't. I know exactly what you're trying to do, but because I know more about computers than you do, I know that the web app you're suggesting isn't the best solution. It would be better if we could do [whatever-- insert appropriate buzzwords here]. Then we could get all the benefits from the web app you propose, but it would be more efficient and easier to maintain."
Basically what he's pointing out is that computers have become so central to the operations of many businesses that you can't have business decisions and IT decisions made by two separate management teams that aren't really talking to each other. You have to try to make IT a full member of the team, and not an in-house outside contractor.
Re:Right idea, weird reasoning (Score:2, Informative)