Sigh! We have been through this before. Joe Peppard’s article, “It’s Time to get rid of the IT Department”, makes some interesting points, but it paints all of IT with a single brush. And it brings back many of the experiences of business in the past. His essay should be added to the list of articles that had the same theme, including Nicholas Carr’s “IT Doesn’t Matter”, and Lester Thurow’s claims that IT had not delivered value.
It has always been appropriate to provide business functions with the ability to be flexible and responsive to business’ changing needs. Providing that flexibility requires that there be a sound foundation of network infrastructure, security, license and vendor management, and attention to the overall integration of these services to provide reliability, resiliency, and business continuity. Measuring the value of these investments and capabilities has always been a challenge, but the absence of them immediately reveals their value. Businesses cease to operate.
Peppard is focused on decentralizing the ability to create new marketing capabilities, or to adjust manufacturing schedules, or changes in supply chains. Historically, this would have been done on Excel spreadsheets, or through data extracts and analyses. Today, as he points out this can be done with point and click user interfaces.
The chaos of managing a business using unaudited Excel spreadsheets, or making decisions from extracting the wrong data are familiar. All of these approaches share the same risks. Whether it is an Excel spreadsheet or desktop created code, they typically serve the individual who designed them. When that person departs, moves, or is promoted, they either become ossified or unmaintained. Lacking documentation, they become “the way we have always done things.”
Peppard seems to be describing an IT governance mechanism that resembles either Feudalism, or Anarchy. Assuming the enterprise agrees that some level of standardization / commonality is beneficial, then the enterprise will need a governance mechanism to maintaining the standardization. No matter how loose the standard or guideline, enforcement can become a nightmare. In the absence of a central group to enforce guidelines, IT will become a loose federation of yahoos who may or may not be willing to cooperate. Virtually everyone will agree that the enterprise needs standards, as long as everybody else adopts theirs.
What is needed typically is a balance of the flexibility he seems to champion, balanced with a solid core of well managed services. It is true that, especially in the transition to Digital Business, there may need to be significant changes to this core. Businesses need to have a governance mechanism that allows some flexibility without losing the real benefits provided by the Central IT function. Creating a single island of technology may be an effective way to experiment, but an archipelago of islands means a network of one-to-one bridges. Who is going to build those bridges and maintain them? Perhaps his recently gotten-rid-of IT function?
Articles with provocative headlines grab reader attention and stimulate conversation. Unfortunately, central IT organizations provide too many important but unglamorous functions needed to keep the enterprise operating. Getting rid of the IT department is not practical. Getting rid of IT has an appeal that is seductive, but organizations should be wary of what they ask for.
Prometheus Endeavor is a consortium of former IT Strategy Consultants
