Success in IT often depends on timing -- the tough-to-master skill of knowing when to apply a new technology, or when to discontinue an older one.
The enterprise world is full of examples right now: When is it time to start focusing on big-data and analytics? When is it time to start reorganizing one's marketing along the lines of a social business? When to discontinue a commercial product in favor of an open-source one? When to move to cloud services?
These kinds of questions are never purely financial. ROI calculations can help; analytics surely help. But there is typically a point when action must be taken, or not -- when a final judgment call must be made.
The business literature is filled with advice on how IT professionals can determine the timing of various strategic and tactical moves. This advice is sometimes very detailed, but a few generalities can be drawn from various sources:
Determine whose decision it is before making a move. Sometimes, IT has been put into a position it doesn't belong in. This is the case when departments have opted to circumvent IT -- a typical maneuver, apparently, in cloud service adoption. So at least one consultant, Info-Tech Research Group, advises IT pros to figure out what IT's job is -- and is not.
Get the big picture. Experts advise knowing as much as possible about market conditions that surround a move to new technology. For example, changes wrought by big-data, social networking, and mobile computing are changing such industries as pharmaceuticals in profound ways. If IT can see far enough ahead to know what new approaches will be required, it's probably time to start positioning IT for those changes. Sometimes that can be as simple as recasting partnerships with marketing, or assigning personnel to manage internal social networking.
Break the solution into parts. In a recent newsletter, David Hill of the Mesabi Group notes that big-data can be considered as "1) the creation, capture, and organization of the data itself and 2) the analytics processes by which some benefit -- such as insight, actions to be taken or monetary transactions -- deliver value..." By breaking big-data into two parts, IT can better decide what steps to take when putting together a big-data plan.
Knowing when to act is never as simple as it may sound in the business literature. But by acknowledging the need to define timing and understand the issues involved, IT pros can set the stage for success.
Great thoughts, Billr13. Your illustration of how business and IT are not in sync really brings the point home. Sometimes I think that idea of them being out of sync is so often repeated we pretty much forget what it means.
Aren't you talking around the main issue here: when to make big IT changes is when the business tells you to, period. They may even tell you how to do it, or just timing of when you have to have it done and leave you to figure it out. But they drive it. It's that simple yet IT screws it up all the time. Let's say a company's competitors are badly kicking its ass. IT must be able to react to what the business needs to be more competitive, when it needs it, where it needs it, how it needs it. But IT professionals (which is to say technology focused types, engineers, et. al.) are often criticized for their tendency to be too analytical and introspective. They analyze when they should execute, another way of saying they sometimes don't focus on what's critically important, which in this example could be TIMING. For example, take market share and competitors. Business professionals, being wired much differently that tech professionals, are taught that sometimes speed and reaction time are more important than having all the facts and thoroughly analyzed, well thought out plans in order to get ahead of your competition. They understand that the "first to market" with a product or service doesn't have to be the best, but it has to be first. That it's much harder to take away market share than it is to accumulate it first. So to them, 'timing' means you have to move fast, make fast changes, be first to market. There are dozens of other examples of disconnects between what the business needs and what IT wants to deliver but the point is that unless IT understands business exigencies it will never understand Rule #1 of when to make big IT changes. They will study to death things that are not critically important to the business, not respond to more urgent things that do matter, and they then appear stagnant or worse, obstinate. The business will tell them when it is time to make big IT changes. The three points of advice you make, Mary, are good...but only if you have the luxury of time. But timing is exactly what the blog post is about, and the answer is "when the business compels you to change" and not be seen as a hindrance to business execution.
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