Where you might be going wrong in IT, and how to fix it

I usually try to create short punchy posts to get people in IT thinking outside of our cultural norms, traditional approaches and to show support for the hard job CIOs have in such a complex world we are now in, but I thought I would take a longer form approach this time to cover a bigger area and highlight challenges in Technology governance, which I hope will give you something to think about. I hope you become as focused as I am on making a difference in our industry and supporting change, not just peripheral change of little things here n there but really turn things upside down and break down the old power structures, Why, because I think if we don’t there won’t be an IT industry any more.

You might be thinking a few things,

• Who is this guy to be doing that, has not even an ITIL expert
• You might be thinking there is no need, everything is great the way it is
• or even that it’s just the stuff around the edges that needs changing.
• many will say "IT will always be needed" IT is the business....

I wish to confront these ideas and show you a new way of thinking that is helping to overcome the challenges traditional methods are not, it’s getting serious that the UK is lacking innovation closing itself off to new ideas and concepts that could avoid a very real danger that is fast approaching.

The big admission

IT best practices used incorrectly are harming your business and it’s not your fault. Many times I hear that it is because people don’t understand them that’s causing IT to drift apart from its business and that you should vet your sources of information to only pay attention to those with certificates and experience, the trusted people.

I am worried that this is also closing people off to new ideas and makes an assumption that people are gullible enough to believe everything they read. I think your better than that and I believe that the best ideas are coming from outside of that highly experienced and qualified group, with a few exceptions such as Simon Kent, Karen Ferris, Zdenek Kvapil and Aaron barnes etc.

Why, because of something called anchoring, we as humans tend to anchor our beliefs to things. Mental reference points and personal emotions caused by a myriad of things that create a cognitive bias, meaning we cannot be truly impartial in our assessment of information advice and guidance. One of the things I noted about myself is I am of the fast thinking bias and don’t want to be bogged down in details I like things short, sharp and simple so I can follow them and change often if needs be. I crave new experiences and grow tired of outdated views, that doesn’t mean I have all the answers far from it. I am working with people who are innovative and exciting that are bringing forward new ideas, like the guys at Think Nation, Digital treetop and Digital Scotland.

I include myself in this bias though and understand my bias is towards the unknown, I like to break rules it makes me feel good when some says, "I never thought of it that way" and goes on to solve impossible challenges because they saw them in a new light unrestrained by "how things are done". So when people say you should restrict your sources to only those of industry accepted approaches I suggest you don’t, in fact you must widen your sources outside of those and make a balanced judgment, because there is no proven best practice, no one can give you empirical evidence beyond its better than nothing and well accepted, all you have is the best use of resources you know how at the present time. It doesn’t matter if their background is 40 years in IT or straight out of college they both have something you might not have considered, but you’re the only judge of that.

Why things are not great

Let’s start back at the beginning, when technology first started making an impact in business leaders of the time were following industrial age thinking of what a business is and how it works, using models that were prevalent at the time. IT was young no one really understood it very well and quite frankly it was a bit of a pig. It broke down regularly and was in a bit of a mess, so some smart people in the UK government set about creating best practices for managing this problematic infrastructure.

This is where the problems come from, the only real sources of knowledge trusted in this new IT stuff was the big external service providers, who unwittingly were anchored to their own world of selling services. They came up with what was to become the only model for managing IT in business, it was chaos or this, obvious choice for anyone. This model took sources of inspiration from the best known ways of managing services to customers, like airlines, hospitality and transport. Distilled down to a set of practises that have been used ever since, but have never been challenged as still relevant, at least not in any real way, meanwhile these original sources of business management have been rewritten from the ground up many times and are in the process of doing it again, why, because they understand that knowledge has a shelf life.

I often claim that this model of managing IT is out of date and doesn’t fit with internal IT, I am convinced it doesn’t and don’t believe peripheral change is enough to meet the facts of today, adding a few bits and connecting to other models based on the same theory will do nothing to address the underlying assumptions that have already been changed in their original source. Internal IT is not a service provider, its much more complex than that. If you were able to look outside the cave you would see that different paradigms exist, so the dogma that every IT department should act like a service provider simply isn’t true today, and we need an entirly different approach.

So applying the thinking from box A above is not a good thing unless you are of course an IT services provider like IBM, HP etc. the same applies if you are not a software provider why use their models across the whole landscape, use them where they are relevant and where they work, but not a blanket to cover all. None of the existing models are designed for the perspective of the CIO and digital ecosystems in a VUCA world, except the new ideas being created without a bias of 30 year old thinking.

So how is this making things worse

The problem is that by following the paradigm of being a service provider, making your colleagues somewhat external like those of a true service provider has created a gap, IT own technology, the business own demand and innovation, IT will fulfil requirements and create an end to end value chain, but this has made IT reactive. It has also created an issue of overly complex reporting designed for economic transaction that are not relevant internally. Mix this with emerging technology that the business sees as an advantage in a complex ecosystem and IT looks like its inefficient. Not to mention the development in cloud solutions making technology easier to manage, but IT keeps telling us it’s not that easy.

IT therfore look to create more efficiencies and look at internal processes because the business want to reduce this overhead and were now locked in a cycle of cost reduction to fight a problem we don’t need to have. Its only there because were using an incorrect approach.

The business needs to innovate at pace and we look to try and find ways to make things faster so we have tried to meld in Agile and lean to help deliver things faster and more efficient, but this isn’t working either, again were using the wrong model to manage problems we are creating. Pushing IT as the enabler is also not going to cut it with executives because there is a much bigger picture involved in the business than just enabling value, a word which no one seems to understand, mainly because value is personal you cannot decive what is of value to some one else and expect it to stay static while you deliver it.

Can any CIO say they have solved everything with any of these models or are the same pressures coming from above, why do I need IT and why does it cost so much, can we do without it yet. The business are looking outwardly at the world and seeing new business models jump in to top spot and wondering why they can’t do this too. Leadership and culture are major issues but that culture is born from the models we follow. Culture is the way leaders want their business to run. They have processes and they must be followed, the mechanics of the business are based on industrial thinking so acting outside of compliance is frowned upon. How can you change culture without changing the thing that is creating it.

The more we try to use the same thinking to improve, the more we spend and the less we see as a return, its diminishing returns on the system we created. We also have a habit of running a project then leaving things, but this causes a problem too because everything is moving, anything left still is actually going backwards.

This leaves us with a challenge, the old models are not working, the business are not happy, IT are not seen as adding any value, we must reduce costs, speed up and innovate......

IT will always be needed

This is a mantra from IT and its creating a false sense of security, IT is not the business, the business is and IT is just a part of that. It’s simple, ask yourself this is IT becoming easier to use or harder to use....Easier, so why do I need IT.

So if you look at advances in technology, AI and ML are great topics for discussion its being built in everywhere all across the business and IT are often nothing to do with any of it until it hits BAU. Lucky for IT that’s not happening as often as it should. Hive has enabled boilers to be intelligent, reporting their own faults and diagnostic insights, Company’s like Darktrace are using it build enterprise immune systems that will without human intervention reconfigure networks to best secure your business. This trend is growing and becoming easier, Enzen are delivering multi million pound savings to energy companies with cutting edge application of these technologies and layering intelligence across the top, making data science accessible to all.

IT needs to position its self not as a service provider but as an innovation hub, that is leading the businesses relationship with technology and each business function. This is a world of fast paced change, unprecedented complexity that is growing continually. This not a world that Henry Ford would recognise and one that is more like a biological ecosystem than a production line.

This is the threat, if IT is just a service provider delivering services and following its dogmatic approaches to the management of technology they will not be needed, because they represent no advantage over true service providers.

The irony in digital

One of the things that always strikes me is that this view of complex networks and ecosystems has given us a rather ironic opportunity. Through the last 3 decades we have lost our humanity and become machine like in our approach to work. The core idea coming from the industrialisation of industry, we are all part of the production line and must be at our stations completing our tasks as instructed. We came out of the fields in to the factories and have not really moved on from there. Except that the models that are working in these fast growing businesses is actually more like biological systems than it is industrial. Humanity is making a comeback, economic models are starting to use words like fairness, collaboration, sharing and moving away from the old idea of using resources for private gain. New thinking has been accepted outside of IT but is yet to penetrate the think skin of 30 years of theory induced blindness.

Digital in this sense of making businesses more like organisms and taking sources from biology is offering a new way to grow and supports the complexity of the world we live in now and enables systemic change at a continually accelerating pace, much like evolution has for life on earth, organisations must sense the environment, learn and make decisions without knowing the whole value stream up front, instead making the best decisions based on what we currently know and think is the right thing to do, becasue it will be continually changing.

Fanciful nonsense, crazy idea but inevitable evolution

You might be thinking my vision of the future is a bit rose tinted and not practical, I would suggest this is your own anchoring in effect. You are responding with thoughts that are pinned to the models we have used for years and that’s in no way your fault given the weight built up over years. But measuring in this level of fast paced continual change does exist with things like ADRA activity driven resource allocation, RBA resource benefit analysis and Quality indexing the qualitative measurements of progress. These are methods that exist and can be applied to this new reality to provide just enough governance.

Instead of creating eyewatering overheads in order to manage compliance of every task big or small in a linear model or processes wedged in everywhere to measure KPIs that have no relation to the success of the business and are based in theory that is not relevant to your world, you shift our focused to organisational outcomes instead of IT service provider outcomes. We focus on delivery of capabilities for the whole organisation that can be used for advantage in a disrupt or be disrupted environment. You can chart a course through uncertainty, volitility and take a nonlinear approach to acheive success where linear models have failed. One where you can take these humanistic ideas of sharing, fairness and collaboration inside the organisation as a whole and start to reach out to compatible partners that help you build demand, knowledge and growth, you will create a new system that makes these problems a thing of the past.

So the view I have is based on observation, listening and sensing what’s going on around me without the problems of anchoring to what I "know" it’s up to the reader if they agree, disagree or somewhere in the middle, but I will keep supporting CIO's and pushing for the change I think needs to happen because I think it’s in all our best interest to break a few rules and find new perspectives to motivate us as humans and aim for a higher purpose.