Why is it so complex to make IT simple?

Whenever I tell someone I work for an IT company, you see a little spark of fear pop into their eyes while they quickly check their watch. Probably because they know from experience (with other IT people not with me) that there is a big chance the conversation will become complex, lengthy and likely even incomprehensible. So lately I just tell them I work in marketing, which leads to longer and more engaged conversations. But it did make me wonder how IT got into this position, and more importantly, how we can get out of it.

Now, it was not always like this. On my first working day, fresh out of university, when joining the IT department of AKZO (now Akzo Nobel), there was coffee and cake. Not because I joined (it was the 70ties) but because a colleague was leaving for Spain. He was taking a small server with Akzo business applications and a book “How to learn Spanish in 30 days” with him. Four months later he was back and had implemented all of Akzo’s standard processes in the newly bought Spanish consumer products division. And he had lots of stories about the Spanish consumer market, the competition, the customers the food, the weather and about our new colleagues. He had spend most his time with users (sales people, logistics people, marketing etc.) and almost no time with other IT people (also because we did not have many in Spain) and as a result was consulted regularly by the European Management team on matters concerning Spain or other new markets. Back then we did not have Enterprise ERP, SOA’s or Enterprise Serviced Busses, we just had specific applications for purchasing, inventory, order entry, invoicing etc. (guess we would call these silo’s now) and a good understanding of how AKZO’s wanted to manufacture and market consumer products.

Somehow that got lost, now IT talks mainly about SAP, Oracle or Data warehousing and 90% of the time we talk with other IT people. Granted, IT is more important and there is a lot more IT around than in the past and because scale is larger and the level of (technical) integration is much higher, the complexity is often overwhelming, but there must be a way to get back to what really matters (business).

Luckily there are two recent developments that help achieve that. They are on the one hand Portfolio Management Techniques and on the other hand Lean IT. If you are new to Portfolio Management check out "Laws of IT" explores Service Portfolio Management, Lean IT builds on manufacturing best practices and has been discussed earlier in this blog, but make sure you do not miss this vintage paper The IT-dustrial revolution on Lean IT (literally Lean IT avant la lettre).

Lean times call for Lean IT

The full version of this article was co-developed with CA communications.

CIOs find themselves in a tough spot. Budgets have been cut, but the expectations for service delivery remain high. So CIOs are going lean; applying ‘lean’ thinking to their IT strategies. Lean IT allows CIOs to focus on what's most important: delivering value to their internal and external customers ― while lowering costs.

This pragmatic management discipline was road-tested in the manufacturing sector, where lean pioneers like Toyota and Xerox identified ways to eliminate any waste long ago. Lean principles make heavy use of simple visual techniques like KanBan cards. Such lean visualisation techniques apply just as equally to the management of IT services and the underlying technology infrastructure. In IT however, business services consist of intangible bits and packets coursing through electronic infrastructure. It’s not visibly apparent which servers and infrastructure components are supporting which services, so it becomes imperative to visualise end-to-end transactions and the infrastructure that sits under these transactions.

Navigating the Lean IT journey
So what steps can CIOs take in their drive to maximise value while minimising waste? What are the fundamental enablers of Lean IT? There are four areas to consider:

Business engagement with IT
Life doesn’t stop in an economic downturn. The business still requires new or updated IT applications and services to support their strategic initiatives. Here, portfolio management can provide insight into the investment planning process to help ensure that funds are allocated to the IT projects that best support business objectives.

Transaction visibility
To improve customer value, it is important to know what the customer is experiencing. Are your customer-facing applications giving you a reputation for first-class service and responsiveness or causing frustrated customers to seek out your competition? As almost any CIO will testify, in today’s complex data centre infrastructure it’s more difficult than ever to trace the root cause of a performance or availability degradation which may be impacting service quality.

Operational excellence
Strategies to achieve operational excellence include identifying and smoothing out bottlenecks, automating processes to reduce wait-time and errors, and maximising IT asset utilisation through technologies like virtualisation. In essence, just-in-time resourcing needs to become a key discipline within IT.

Security and compliance
When thinking lean, you can’t ignore risk and compliance. At many companies, compliance processes are highly manual and redundant; many different groups use their own spreadsheets or other fragmented toolsets, which can quickly get out of synch, leading to further risk and cost. By centralising compliance information and standardising processes and toolsets, you can reduce risk, remove redundancies, and increase agility to respond as regulations change.

There’s no time to waste: think Lean IT now

Download the the full version of this article

More information on Lean IT at British Airways at http://bit.ly/2ExLiI and on Lean IT at Fujitsu at http://bit.ly/19m55B