Are you left perplexed when you compare the technological quantum leaps that humanity has witnessed in recent decades to their net effect on the efficiency and speed of your corporate IT function?
Does your mood range from remotely curious to downright fed up when you assess your IT department’s inability to keep up with the pace of your business?
Are you coming to the same conclusion as me: that when it comes to responding to changing business needs, corporate IT has been, at best, steadily mediocre throughout the years?
Do you have the unending impression that your corporate IT continues to show signs of an immature field, even after decades of experience?
Are you suspicious that behind the curtains of technological know-how lies a monstrous amalgamation of old and new technologies, created by the same corporate IT team whom it baffles?
If you’ve answered yes to any or all of these questions, then I have two pieces of good news for you.
The Good News
Firstly, you’re not paranoid. After three decades of working in corporate IT, I can assure you that these are matters that you should be concerned about. Even in different times, amongst different industries, or within different countries, every IT professional I consulted before publishing acknowledged the manifestation of these issues again and again.
Secondly, you will soon have a refreshingly different perspective on the sources of these issues. The processes that have been used to explain or to deal with corporate IT’s performance issues until now lack a deeper understanding of their non-technological root causes.
Ignore the Technobabble
The answer is not yet another miracle IT solution, vendor, system, or new technology. You’re probably already under a deluge of technobabble sales pitches, each implying in their own way that big data, disruptive innovation, artificial intelligence, internet of things, machine learning, augmented reality, DevOps, micro-services, or the acronym of the year will propel you into another sphere beyond your current issues.
To get to a new age of corporate IT, a different approach is required: to understand how corporate IT’s underachievement in certain crucial areas — notably, the quality of deliverables — is unrelated to technologies and methods. You’ll discover the true culprits: basic management and governance issues leading to unwanted behaviors, which, in turn, diminish agility. We will get to the bottom of a cause-and-effect sequence, and reach a point where everything will look much simpler, for the root causes of it all are areas where non-IT business executives can act upon.
Lead the Next Phase in IT
By changing role distribution, transferring accountability, and reviewing the measures of performance, business leaders can bring about a profound and lasting movement to the next phase in corporate IT maturity.
You can shift the center of mass in your business and then let the technically savvy execs and managers take care of the detailed processes and logistics required to complete the transition to the next level. Don’t change the players, change the game. Don’t engage with the details yourself; change the engagement model.
What’s Coming Up
Over the next weeks, you will learn why your suspicions are far from being groundless. You will also gain priceless knowledge about how corporate IT operates behind the closed doors of technical expertise. I will provide a fair -and at times brutal- investigation of these concerns, unveiling issues such as the systematic creation of pointless complexity, the over-use of project management principles, the corporate IT “amnesia syndrome”, and many other quality issues that hinder attempts to speedup IT delivery. It should get you primed for a new book available now.