Driving Forces in Business IT exploitation over the years

"You really have to kill the parallel path. If you leave the old way plus the
  new way, the old never goes."

Jack Welch CEO GE

In every area of human endeavour, particularly where new technologies are involved, one sees a continuing learning process by those who are constantly pushing the boundaries of possibility. Progress can often be seen to move forward in discernible waves, as successive breakthroughs are achieved in some key element of that endeavour.

Whether it be in such disparate areas as medical treatment, air and space travel, or the application of computers in so many areas of our lives, the same pattern can be discerned. Either a technological advance, or peoples’ changed attitude towards it, can cause a leap forward in its exploitation. Once one horizon is reached, the next is opened up by another new way forward.

If one looks back over the years at the application of computers within business, one can discern certain evolutionary leaps forward. Typically those advances were stimulated by technological innovation such as the advent of the mini computer, the introduction of the Personal Computer, the development of sophisticated communications, and the introduction of advanced data management tools, to name but a few.

However, whilst technological innovation and its ramifications on those who use it continue to take us through new unexplored horizons, its means of delivery throughout business and the public services has changed little over several decades. The organisation and management of IT service is still largely as it was when its complexity and its business impact was far less than it is today. Technology management has certainly not kept pace with technology innovation.

Over the years it is true that various initiatives to improve IT delivery were introduced within many organisations. These generally took the form of introducing new management procedures, such as project management systems, and promoting more disciplined and comprehensive application of existing management processes. However, in spite of very considerable resources being ploughed by many businesses into such initiatives, the root causes of poor performance stubbornly remained.

In many organisations the specialists who were promoting and introducing the new technologies had to spend a great deal of their time keeping up with the latest technology, which was too often at the expense of becoming business savvy. Meanwhile, those within the business who should have been maximising its impact in critical areas were too often failing to understand the role that should be expected of them; a most unsatisfactory state of affairs, whilst a long established divisive and damaging business/IT culture gap continued to prosper.

To this day therefore those disruptive and demoralising project delays and cost over-runs remain with us as a commonplace characteristic of our exploitation of IT in business and government. Furthermore, there is still too much business focus on the ramifications of the technological solution, at the expense of a more critical examination of possibilities for fundamental business process revolution.

Towards the end of the 90s, business exploitation of IT had reached a relatively high penetration and reasonable level of maturity within many organisations, particularly the more mature corporations. However, with the advent of the Internet, the attention of many boards was diverted from this achievement by the appearance of unrealistic vendor and academia hype concerning the benefits that could easily be derived from investment in the Internet and in the new Dot Coms.

This veritable explosion of interest in the Internet by board members, and in the emergence of the Dot Coms, ignored the painful lessons that had been learned over many years within their own businesses by their established in-house IT professionals. Poorly informed and technology naïve board members accepted damaging advice from enthusiastic and (dare I say it) sales hungry consultants and vendors of new technologies, with the inevitable consequences that we all now know about.

A vast array of new information technologies continue to become ever more pervasive and complex, and more difficult to manage, as each month goes by. At the same time their potential impact on business process effectiveness and bottom line performance has increasingly significant implications for future business profitability and success in the marketplace.

However, the way in which this activity is typically organised and managed in most businesses is still little different from that which existed in the earliest days of very basic Data Processing in the 50s and the 60s. The IT activity is still regarded by business people as a ‘techie’ matter to be managed by the IT professionals, who nevertheless are regarded as lacking in business acumen.

The reality is that the greatest motivating influences for change in the organisation and management of IT have been largely about frustration and impatience on the part of business management, and about the conservatism of IT management who failed to respond effectively to the deep frustrations within the business.

Industry-wide experience clearly indicates that IT process improvements that are constrained within the traditional IT management structures have consistently failed to address the most important issues that have bedevilled the exploitation of IT. 'More of the same' has clearly proved to be inadequate to the need and is certainly not the answer to today’s pressing IT exploitation problems. Hence the UNITY proposals as discussed in The Drowning Director were born.

"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered
  a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."

Western Union internal memo - 1876