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Mature IT management means getting on with it

Beverley Head, Information Age

15/02/2007 11:52:20

The film Touching the Void recounts Simon Yates' and Joe Simpson's climb of Siula Grande in Peru. When Simpson breaks a leg, falls and is left on the mountain by Yates who believes him dead, he starts mapping out the Herculean task to survive.

His "to do" list includes clambering out of a ravine, traversing a perilous glacier alone, without food or water and with a broken leg. It is impossible. So he does nothing for a while. Then he realises he can continue to function if he sets himself smaller tasks which will eventually fulfil the greater goal.

IT professionals are a bit like Joe Simpson. The business tells them what it wants and generally leaves them to do it on their own; IT is expected to meet the business needs, deliver productivity improvements, ensure compliance with a forest of legislation and regulation -- and do it with fewer people and less money.

That's all in a day's work. What will make it even more of a challenge in the future is that "The world of IT will change more in the next five years probably than it has in the last 10", according to John Roberts, vice president and analyst with Gartner. If that's not enough to scare the daylights out of most IT professionals, his follow-up comment will: "And there will be far more of an emphasis on the "I" in IT. And who owns the I? The business. I see more of the business people thinking 'maybe I should own more of this'. This is the management of IT growing up."

If Roberts is right there won't be many central IT groups left in a decade or two; instead most IT professionals will be "embedded" in the business. Although he acknowledges there are risks associated with extensive devolution including "The loss of architecture and process cohesion, a failure to target IT on critical business strategy, a colonisation of the enterprise by external service providers, a failure to synergise business and technology skills and broken IT governance", he still considers IT departments as we know them to be endangered.

He says by 2012 at least 60 per cent of IT organisations in large enterprises will split into a minimum of two groups - one working on sourcing and delivery of infrastructure and another on architecture and change. Roberts claims the shift in part derives from a generational baton change in the workplace, and the emergence of what Gartner refers to as "digital natives" - technologically shrewd young people now entering management positions.

Where today most people working in IT could be described as tactical technology managers Roberts says that there will be an evolution to the point where "IT doesn't exist in the organisation. It's embedded into the business. We are seeing that in a lot of start-up organisations that are founded on technology. It's fundamental to think about enterprise architecture rather than technology architecture.

"You need to think about stepping up to this business consultancy role - or the opportunity will pass you by. Think about the contribution you make to changing business practices."

Aligning IT with business has long been the mantra of IT professionals, and the logical next step is to use IT to optimise business process. But many businesses still haven't made it to first base.

A survey released in December by the Economist Intelligence Unit in association with BMC Software found that fewer than 42 per cent of companies in Australia believe IT and business objectives were well aligned, compared to 56 per cent in the US and 64 per cent in Europe.

It also found that almost one in four Australian businesses felt hamstrung by the lack of communication between IT and other business functions, while fewer than one in five companies in the whole of Asia Pacific felt it was "highly likely" their CIO would become more involved in business improvement over the next year.

There is no doubt that tension persists between IT and the business. More than 75 per cent of the 160 international companies the Aberdeen Group surveyed on behalf of Value Chain International last year said the lack of real-time information about their business was hampering them from identifying and fixing business bottlenecks. Business is sold on the benefits of IT - it just doesn't feel that it's getting them yet.

The arrival of the digital native in the mid to upper ranks of business will unleash even more opportunity for dissatisfaction. Weaned on Google, this new generation of business executives is used to instant access to information: they have set up PCs at home, maybe even grappled with a home network, and like Skype.

If they can get that at home, then they want it at work. Why can't they Google their corporate information? Why can't they work remotely and be able to access all of their work-based information and share that with colleagues and clients when and where they want? Why can't they download the contents of their work desktop onto an 8Gb memory stick and take it home?

A new addition on the "to do" list will be managing the expectations of these digital natives while continuing to develop and maintain robust corporate information systems, design and implement effective information access and security policies, and ensure that telecommuters follow proper health and safety procedures.

Each year analysts and publishers generate new lists of the priorities ahead for CIOs. Each year the order of the priorities changes - but the content remains pretty consistent and generally includes aligning business and IT; security; business continuity and disaster recovery; funding and resourcing; access to skills; governance; data management (storage, archiving, records management); managing legacy systems; and, strategic planning.

This year Gartner has created another top 10 - a list of "New Year Resolutions" which it says should be tackled in tandem with the main game of keeping the information systems running.

CIOs, it says, • should start creating a succession plan for the new generation of IT workers; • begin improving the environmental performance of IT; • reward IT innovators; • re-establish the visibility of total enterprise technology spending; • work with human resources to implement effective social computing tools and techniques; • improve the front-line experience of IT staff by having them work in the business from time to time; • stop returning savings from IT to the business and start to report IT yield; • recognise that proper IT governance is more than compliance with a procedure and requires intimate liaison with the business; • stop obsessing about the minutiae of technology; • and, get hands-on with at least three new technologies during 2007.

It all adds up to one heck of a "to do" list. Paralysis however is not an option; IT professionals will have to borrow from Nike and Joe Simpson, and Just Do It.