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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Mark Twain missed the big one.

As he pointed out, lies, damned lies and statistics can certainly give people the wrong impression. But if you really want to convince someone that up is down, they’re flimsy tools compared to the really big deceiver: Surveys.

I’m not talking about the well-understood practice of asking biased questions, like Burger King’s famous, “Would you prefer to eat a delicious hamburger, cooked from a quarter pound of fresh ground beef on an open flame, or a disgusting, greasy, fried, hockey-puck-like mess?” (I might have the exact phrasing wrong — I’m working from memory) that led to its not-very-effective “The Whopper beat the Big Mac” ad campaign some years back.

Sure, it’s a useful technique. It’s simply second-rate compared to one exemplified by a recent Gartner survey, reported in the January 14th issue of Processor magazine in an article titled, “The End of the IT Department as We Know It.”

The survey asked the popular question, “What’s your biggest frustration — something you’re supposed to accomplish but don’t, or something someone else is supposed to accomplish but doesn’t?”

The exact phrasing was a bit different. Gartner asked corporate executives to identify what gets in the way of strategic change in their companies, and IT failures beat out changing the culture. Since the culture changers are themselves and IT is someone else, the response is less than surprising.

Perception, of course, is reality, so you need to pay attention to this, especially since Gartner sells the perception to the executives with whom you work, also sells its solution, and, unlike you, has a paid sales force and PR machine. According to the article (and to be fair, it’s possible Gartner’s actual findings had fewer logical holes than the article that presented them) what’s going to happen is:

New technologies, that deliver pre-packaged workflows to businesses, and let businesspeople reconnect the process flows by manipulating visual tools and pushing a button (Ta-Da!!!) will fundamentally change the responsibilities of IT departments.

Since today most IT organizations spend the bulk of their budgets on operations and applications, something fundamental needs to change. Mix in outsourcing and the end of IT is at hand.

Oh, and the career solution for technical professionals? Get an MBA.

Let’s deconstruct this, shall we? First of all, suggesting that IT should spend most of its budget on something other than applications and operations is a bit like suggesting that Toyota should spend most of its budget on something other than designing and manufacturing cars. Applications are what people use to do their work. What, other than running the applications you have while enhancing them and delivering new ones, are you supposed to be doing? Raising chickens?

Second, workflow tools (just another class of application, by the way) don’t automate work. They automate the process of assigning work. Once the work arrives at employees’ desks, they still need business applications to help them do it.

Maybe the point is that businesses will start to view internal processes as commodities. Instead of figuring out how you want to run your business, you’ll just buy best-practice processes off-the-shelf, pre-automated and pre-integrated, with no work required from IT other than to install them and no work required from anyone else other than training the end-users.

Yeah, that’ll work. Your COO will buy Wal-Mart’s supply chain processes, Nordstrom’s customer relationship management, Amazon.com’s e-commerce, and Dell’s build-to-order. Voila! Like magic, out will come a lean, mean, fighting medical-devices, cosmetics, or maybe janitorial services machine.

There’s an old saying in the consulting business: It looks great on the PowerPoint.

So here’s some advice you might find a bit more practical regarding how to keep the joint running, from your old keep the joint runner:

Keep on spending most of your budget on operations and applications. Shift as much out of operations as you can every year — but only what you can shift through improved efficiency and not a penny more.

Spend as much as you can on applications — not just coding, of course, but all the associated disciplines that spell the difference between code that runs and successful business change.

And most important of all, pay attention to the “biggest frustration” that started this chunk of rant ‘n roll. Many IT organizations still haven’t mastered the fundamental discipline of managing projects to successful conclusion.

If you haven’t, perception really is reality, and while your IT department might not go away, you probably will. Soon.

And not under your own steam.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Consultants are obliged to eat their own dog food, or so the saying goes. Given the high esteem in which the IT class holds consultants, being considered canine is, relatively speaking, a compliment.

So at the risk of having readers think this column is going to the dogs, I have to modify a long-held position promoted here for years. If I didn’t, I’d just have to modify a different position promoted for just as long.

What isn’t changing is a core principle — that there is no such thing as best practice, only practices that fit circumstances best. Everything depends on context.

What is changing is that internal customers aren’t pure evil anymore. There is a circumstance where the internal customer concept is a good fit.

Go back to basic economics — namely, the nature of marketplaces, which is where buying, selling, and customers reside. Marketplaces optimize the allocation of resources — the balance of supply and demand.

So here’s the syllogism: The major premise is that by having internal customers you’ve created an IT marketplace. The minor premise is that marketplaces optimize resource allocation. The inescapable conclusion is that treating the rest of the business as a collection of internal customers optimizes IT resource allocation.

To make this all work, the rest of the business has to actually be a bunch of customers. They have to pay you (and each other, when appropriate) for the products and services they use, and they have to be free to take their business elsewhere. You have to be allowed to price your services so that you can afford to deliver whatever service someone elsewhere in the business is willing to pay for.

Very important: The people running the business can’t hold you accountable for bad investments in information technology. That’s no longer your job, any more than Home Depot is responsible for the consequences of your decision to paint exterior walls with interior paint.

Even more important: End-users still aren’t your customers. That hasn’t changed, and won’t. Customers make buying decisions. End-users are consumers — a different role entirely.

If budget managers are your customers, the thorny problem of IT resource allocation — most of the IT governance process — goes away entirely. They pay, you deliver. Otherwise, you don’t get involved. Your scope of responsibility is limited to delivering working software and services that meet specifications. Whether any of it does the business any good at all is Someone Else’s Problem.

Sounds attractive, doesn’t it?

Does this mean the new official position of Keep the Joint Running is that you should make a 180 degree change and treat the rest of the enterprise as your internal customer?

Nope. The new official position is, it depends. If the enterprise’s most significant challenge is resource allocation, go right ahead.

But …

Markets optimize resource allocation and only resource allocation. They’re useless for establishing and pursuing a shared purpose, and for managing shared resources. Which is to say: The business community has done an admirable job of recognizing unmet needs and addressing them. But it took government to launch the space program. To establish the interstate highway system. To build the Internet. And to protect the environment, the stock market, and the food supply — from business.

In terms relevant to the business you serve, if everyone in the business is each other’s customer, the enterprise’s ability to act with strategic purpose will become, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent.

And your ability to maintain a coherent architecture will be severely reduced. A scenario to illustrate the point: Marketing decides to define “customer” in terms of households. Marketing is your customer; you comply. A year later, Customer Service needs its call center agents to see which callers received which recent marketing campaigns. That’s just too bad: Marketing only needs households, and isn’t willing to spend the additional money to maintain individual customer data for the benefit of a different department.

Then there’s the need to create and maintain an internal billing system — full employment for accountants, but zilcho on the value scale for the company.

If the people running the business think it can succeed by having every department in the company buy and sell services from each other like some crowded bazaar, they’ll turn internal politics into a strategy, governance into game-playing, and competition into something that happens inside the corporate organizational chart. But if that’s their decision, you have no choice.

Set up your stall and start selling.

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