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Why "Running IT As a Business" Is a Bad Idea
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.'"
I work for a large insurance company in the UK. I'm a 'senior developer' if you like. One of my biggest gripes? The notion that work on the website - for a purist such as myself (and web designers and editors that also work on the site) - is subject to zero requirements, the 'customers' want everything for nothing, time-based 'estimates' that are taken as the law of the land. Every approach the customer wants you to implement is never in the right frame of mind for how the web works (noone understands the medium in which they're presenting to the customer outside). Your work is governed, oriented and OK'd by people who have no interest in how to do things properly. Fat-cat bosses who think their 10 years experience in Fortran 30 years ago makes for true understanding of how a website should work. Their way, no matter how stupid it seems to you the unenlightened one, is the right way. Trust me, I'm a fat-cat!
What ends up giving way? Quality. And it pisses me off. I can't do my job properly. Code reviews, unit/mock/functional testing, analysis, UML *all* have to give way because of all the above and just to get it out on time. Maintenance costs increase, but as long as it's out of the door it's OK. Would you build a house without blueprints? Would you remove an accountant's calculator from their desk because *you* don't work that way? Nope. [Excuse the crude analogies, they still get the point across]
The following sums it up well:
I've always hated this is approach to web development and steering change on websites. It's backwards. Archaic. Frustrating.
ilovegeorgebush
You've got part of the idea. The main problem in IT is that since we don't actually make a profit off anything directly (unlike the pizza analogy), what accounting/management sees is a department that's better at making pizzas for less than last year. As such, they figure that it would be *even better* if you could, perhaps, make a substantially similar pizza with less people and less money.
Keep that going for a few years, and you end up with people wondering why it takes so long for their pizza to arrive, and why, when it does, that its missing some of the requested toppings and the cheese is partially dehydrated Velveeta.
The perennial problem of IT: It's benefits are several degrees removed from its efforts, from the POV of an accountant. No direct revenue generation means "less spent is better", with no solid way to quantify the benefits of having a well funded, well populated IT group (as opposed to not having one or both).
While I do agree that running IT like a business is often not the best way to go about it, some of the things said in the article are simply bizarre. For example, what does this even [b]mean[/b]:
Instead of reacting to users, he should be their peer. Primarily, I asked him why he didn't transition from building Web apps to instead creating a solution using cloud technology and true mobile devices like BlackBerrys, iPods, and emerging tablets. He could offer a better solution, at about a quarter of the cost.
While buzzword compliant it doesn't really mean anything.
If you run a factory, that's true. In almost every other business, it's not.
IT makes 90% of what goes on in a modern company possible at all. ERP, CRM, CMS and about three dozen other "tools" are as vital to a company today as hammers and workbenches were to a craftsman hundreds of years ago. Janitors aren't. They clean up and we don't want to miss them, but they don't run the company.
IT isn't the brain of most non-tech companies, but it certainly is the heart - it keeps the blood/information flowing through the veins/channels. Going even a few hours without it is noticeable in most companies, IT going down for a day is the corporate equivalent of a heart attack.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Really? Where I'm at, as IT gets progressively more like the exact thing TFA advises against, I think "customer service" is actually getting poorer.
Back in the day, users would send an email to IT to get stuff fixed. If the problem warranted, a discussion would develop, an agreement would be made, and work would be done.
Today, we have a faceless ticketing system where users are forced to fill in drop downs that categorize their problem, to make sure reporting is nice and easy for the management. If IT has to query the user, they're supposed to put this query through the ticketing system. Direct communication is becoming less and less desirable, as is customization. If a user asks for something special or unique, the response is almost always "we don't support that".
Bob Lewis dispels the familiar litany that 'IT should be run as a business
IT is a service, a service that makes your business run better. And the better that service is shaped to your business, the more adapted to how you work, the more efficiently your business operates. The biggest payback from IT is saving money. A dollar saved is better than a dollar earned. A dollar saved is pure profit. A dollar earned you have to subtract the cost of overhead and doing business.
Too many times IT people operate from a perspective that's more religion than service. The time to upgrade to Windows 7 is not when SP 1 comes out, it's when upgrading saves the company money. A service mentality does not try to force-fit technology where it doesn't belong. Maybe not everyone in the company needs Windows 7. Maybe the call center can use Ubuntu workstations, maybe the graphics departments work more efficiently with Macs. A service mentality focuses on what works best for the company and saves money, not what your technical people know and where they've invested their training. Yet I see that a lot. Not what works best, but what the techs know. Their expertise limits their technology choices instead of expanding them.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
And in some places I have worked you would now get the following...
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.
Ideally, as someone who isn't in IT but uses technology, I like to think the IT guys are on my side. If something is broken, and I can't fix it myself, or something could be better and I can't improve it (due to lack of knowledge or resources or access), they're there to help me out. Setting up IT "as a business" fundamentally changes this way of thinking about things, though. My group then sees IT as a cost center: we want to use as little of their stuff as possible, or we might get billed for them doing stuff for us. IT sees us as customers to whom a bunch of crap can potentially be sold, generating revenue for their IT business.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Do you drop your trash on the ground wherever you please? Why not? You are far more important than the janitors, both by title and salary.
Why not let the janitors follow you around and clean up after you as you constantly change their job requirements? YOUR job produces the revenue for THEIR salary, right? They should accommodate your wishes at all times.
Oh, wait, if you did that, you'd just be an asshole. The amount of extra babysitting you'd require from the cleaning staff means other coworkers aren't getting the support they need.
Your petty "IT are just janitor schmucks" attitude is self-centered, narrow-minded, and utterly detrimental to the company as a whole. All you amount to is being the jackass that never flushes toilet 'cause he's too important.
I don't care how good the pizza tastes if it's made with pig anus and old fore skin. So how something is made does matter under certain circumstances.
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.
Living With a Nerd
Interesting article. From what I have observed over the past few decades, there has been a steady growth in ideology in business schools and economics departments. These ideologies are usually simplistic models or sets of ideas that are supposed to be broadly applicable. Many of these ideologies have come and gone like fads. Many of them, while useful, are not axiomatic. Business school graduates often treat the "management" skill-set that they learn in school as broadly applicable to any field. Thus, MBA graduates may move between extremely diverse positions. I know of one that went from managing a train manufacturing plant to managing a food manufacturing facility. Because he had no previous experience with working with food, he faced significant difficulties both in making the food plant operate smoothly, and in making a profit. He didn't have a clear idea of where he could cut within the operation without endangering food safety. He lacked both detailed knowledge of production methods, and had a poor understanding of scientific principles. Under the ideology of business school, this person's management skills should have been directly transferrable between many different fields. The reality on the ground was quite different
In the case of the topic at hand, it seems to me that one particular model, consisting of customers and service providers with all such relationships entail, is not optimally applicable to a specific situation (IT). The economy, and the world, is far more complicated and subtle than simplistic and faddish business school ideologies.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Oh I agree with you. This is why I now avoid working in large enterprises. The work is generally more satisfying in a small/medium size business. Far less tedious, time wasting meetings about nothing. And nothing beats actually helping people get there stuff done better because of you.
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).
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Actually, this is something I have always disagreed with. Software development is nothing to do with IT, except that it uses IT. The idea that software development should be under IT seems to me to be the same as saying that electronics design should be under the building maintenance dept. because they deal with the electrical systems. Corporate IT (infrastructure / networking / servers / desktops / support) is a totally different thing to software development. I think one of the big mistakes in corporate IT is to make one big 'geek dept'.
The article highlights the flaws of poor communication skills, attributes these flaws to "IT as a business", and then suggests a new method...which is just as susceptible to communication flaws.
I don't think you understood what you read else you couldn't have come to the conclusion you have. Right now, "IT as a business", creates a multitude of barriers which by their very nature inhibit communication. In many places this is actually by design and intent.
By stopping the impenetrable castle defense of IT from hiding behind ticket systems, voice mails, and layers of management, IT needs to be in bed with business. A shared pain is a fixed problem so long as money can be found. And if it can't, everyone understands rather than it being, "that damn IT group preventing my success."
Since IT is always treated as a cost center, the rest of the company is always looking to save money but axing IT. In turn, for IT to justify IT's continued existence, IT is always looking to build a billable project out of a mole hill. This does nothing but create an internal adversarial relationship between IT and the rest of the company. This in turn creates the human factors which create barriers in communication.
In most every large shop I've been in, IT actively works to provide value to the company and desperately wants to contribute to the company's overall success. The problem is, the entire rest of the company sees IT as a cost center and they are therefore actively working to eliminate IT, directly or indirectly. This requires IT justify EVERYTHING.
Until corporate culture changes, the "rest of the company" is the sole reason why IT not only costs more than it should but why mole hill tasks becomes a mountain of a project. Simply put, IT has no other choice as survival rides on it. Which finally brings us full circle. Companies have two choices; one, isolate IT and demand they justify their existence every day at every turn, whereby human factors take over, including breakdown of communication. Two, integrate them and empower them to help them help you; whereby IT's business becomes the company's success. Integration requires communication. The later of the two means those same human factors which cause so many problems in the first case, actually benefit the entire company in the second case. The second case is only possible with effective communication, and tearing down barriers is in everyone's self interest.
In short, communication is important to all businesses. The question is, are you creating barriers or enlisting everyone to assist in your success? Right now the common business mantra is the former rather than the later. If businesses want better IT bang for the buck, they need only look at their own corporate culture and ask, "how can I help you help me?" Synergy, when not used as a worthless buzzword, really can be a wonderful thing.
From my perspective as an IT person - who has to spend a scary amount of time writing scripts and reverse-engineering various black-box 'off the shelf' software packages just to figure out how to install them, let alone get logs off them and get them to communicate with the rest of our IT infrastructure - I think most 'software developers' could really benefit by spending a few years in the IT trenches.
Software development really suffers from living in its own little bubble - a bubble where the developer thinks nothing of wiping and installing a whole new machine just to put their new package on, nobody ever needs to install patches, and there's no infrastructure. Software developers often seem to believe that their program is the world, a unique beautiful snowflake. Which is fine, it's their baby, they have some pride in their work. But a program is not a standalone thing, and a developer's job really isn't even started until they've worked out how their program integrates with everything else in a corporate infrastructure: how it gets deployed, how it gets configuration settings, how it gets updates (no, having an 'update now' window pop up to the user is THE WRONG ANSWER in the corporate world), where it emits logs to and in what format, how it talks to the Web server, how it talks to file and print, how it works on multiple OSes, etc.
And yes, this also applies to the new world of 'web applications'. Just because you've made a flashy new web service doesn't mean you've achieved anything - how do the users export their data, how do you send real-time updates to all the other web services on the planet, how do you track evolving standards, etc.
There's only one discipline in computing which is *all about* integrating the diverse systems that we all use every day - and that's IT! Hi there. You write the stuff - but we have to *make it work for us*. Sometimes that's amazingly difficult, and we just have to wonder what you development guys are smoking, and if you've ever tried to use your tools - or at least, use them in conjunction with anyone else's.
'IT' shouldn't be a separate thing. It should be called something like 'integration science' perhaps and analyzed like computer science.
For instance: making a very complex network configuration change is just like programming, but it gets no respect or tool support. 'Code' gets all sorts of IDEs, version-control systems - but can you version-control all the changes you make to your VMware images, Cisco switch configs, Active Directory schemas, databases, DNS entries, backups scripts? Can you manage all of these with a unified tool, as if they were all vital parts of the unified computing machine which in fact they are? No of course you can't. Why? What's stopping you?
The sheer diversity of incompatible tools, the lack of integration or standards, but mainly, the deep-seated attitude that 'IT is just janitor work' and that 'the real interesting challenges are in software development, not installation/support/deployment'. Sorry, but not from where I'm standing.
The network IS the computer now - so how about we get the tools we need to program that computer with a unified language? and save and load programs from it?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC