All Posts in Shadow IT

|In: Architecture|Last Updated:

Jimmy Dean should never have recorded “Big Bad John.” His squeaky tenor just doesn’t fit the lyrics — they demand a Johnny Cash baritone.

Still, Dean got some things right — his sausages, for example.

And, he gave us a useful quote: “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” It will never make it on despair.com, but that’s okay. Cynicism is more fun, but figuring out how to make things work is what pays the bills.

My last two columns have talked about the direction of the wind (“An imperfect storm,” 2/24/2014 and “More storm warnings,” 3/4/2014) — trends you can’t do much to affect, and do have to respond to:

  • Cloud 3.0 — enterprise-class computing that includes cloud-based applications.
  • Shadow IT — the growing amount of information technology implemented without IT’s involvement.
  • The digital enterprise — a grab-bag; right now its most important elements are smart products, the so-called “internet of things,” and all of the opportunities possible when you put the two together.
  • Income disparity — and the rising demand for luxuries and uniqueness by those on the lucky end of this trend.
  • The rise of business practices over processes — practices being the way to organize how work gets done so as to be able to deliver uniqueness.

Your challenge: Adjusting your sails so IT can at least survive these trends and maybe even enjoy the outcome. Suggestions:

Get the relationship right. I know you’re tired of hearing me rant and rave about moving beyond the supplier/internal-customer relationship model to a fully collaborative alternative. I also know I talk to IT leaders all the time who haven’t made the transition.

It matters in this context because in your brave new world of embracing shadow IT, a collaborative relationship is what will stop shadow IT from become rogue IT.

Automated regression testing. Take this to the limit, and beyond.

Cloud 3.0 means multi-cloud plus inside-the-firewall infrastructure provisioning. Multi-cloud, and especially multiple cloud solutions managed directly by the lines of business, means patch management and version management move outside IT’s control.

With automated regression testing you might be able to persuade the lines of business that IT should test cloud-vendor-induced configuration changes before they’re put into production. Without it, IT will once more be positioning itself as a bottleneck rather than an enabler.

Redefine the “I” in “IT.”

Except for shadow IT, all of these trends mean more work for IT, not less. Even cloud computing doesn’t mean IT has less work to do. You’ll be managing multi-cloud systems. Think monitoring for availability and performance. Think more reliance on your WAN. Think about what restoring from backup now means. Especially, think about integration.

This is the redefinition of “I” — from “information,” which never truly encompassed IT’s responsibilities anyway, to “integration,” which completely describes where IT is essential.

Look, like it or not, sales managers everywhere understood the difference between cloud-based shadow IT and the installed alternative. Installed software meant asking IT to unlock sales reps’ laptops so they could install Act! and asking IT to provide a server so their laptops could synchronize to a shared database.

The Cloud meant buying licenses from Salesforce, doing everything through the browser, and getting the shared database too, all with no IT involvement.

So encourage Shadow IT. Get rid of as much responsibility for the applications portfolio as you can. For individual applications, shadow IT’s drawbacks are diminishing, and this also eliminates the “This application doesn’t do what I need” vs “The specs were wrong” arguments that now dominate many business/IT relationships.

But integrating the applications? Only IT … “Integration Technology” … can make this happen.

Which gets us to enterprise technical architecture management (ETAM). This is a long-running personal favorite, and it’s only going to be more important in the future.

A multi-cloud environment with lots of quasi-independent line-of-business and departmental IT departments adding to the application layer is akin to a bunch of developers adding buildings to a community without building codes or well-designed water purification, electricity-delivery and sewage treatment systems to connect to.

In particular, the ETAM function should choose the company’s integration technology system and define the company’s data integration engineering requirements.

Data integration is what causes the most trouble when it comes to accidental architecture. Without a clean, clear, well-engineered approach, shadow IT will exacerbate the situation exponentially.

Okay, okay. “Polynomially” is more accurate, but who’s counting?

* * *

15 years ago in KJR’s predecessor, InfoWorld’s “IS Survival Guide”: An app dev methodology that looks a lot like Agile, two years before the Agile Manifesto.

Way back in 1996, I recommended viewing yourself as a product, not an employee.

And ten years ago, how to avoid the proximity trap — the tendency to pay more attention to those who have access than to those who have answers.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Last week I promised you organizational solutions this week to trends hitting IT, like Cloud 3.0, increasing levels of shadow IT, and the so-called “digital enterprise.” But it’s my birthday tomorrow, and as Leslie Gore didn’t quite say back in the days of my youth, it’s my party and I’ll lie if I want to.

I will get to organizational solutions. Just not this week. Be patient.

Anyway, there are two more trends we have to deal with before we get to solutions, and unlike last week’s trends, you aren’t going to read much about these any place but here. Which either means you should be glad you’re reading this, or they aren’t real because if they were, someone else would be writing about them too.

The return of Excellence

Forget Tom Peters. As regular visitors to this space know, business processes, practices and functions can be optimized in exactly six dimensions of analysis that trade off among one another:

  • Fixed cost — the cost of turning the lights on before any work gets done.
  • Incremental cost — the cost of processing one more item.
  • Cycle time — how much time elapses processing one item from start to finish.
  • Throughput — how much work the function churns out in a unit of time … its capacity, in other words.
  • Quality — the absence of defects.
  • Excellence — flexibility and the ability to tailor to individual needs and outcomes.

Excellence in this restricted sense is going to be increasingly important for business success. Why? Wealth stratification.

The wealthiest segments of society are becoming wealthier, controlling an increasingly disproportionate share of the world’s total assets. As is by now well-known, the wealthiest 85 people on earth control as much wealth as the poorest 3,500,000,000. As is also well-known, and is more important from a business planning perspective, in the United States 95% of the economic recovery since 2009 went into the coffers of the wealthiest 3,000,000 citizens. Meanwhile, the poorest 270,000,000 became poorer.

This isn’t a we-gotta-do-something-about-this!” column, although doing something about this would probably be a good idea.

This is a there-must-be-a-way-to-take-advantage-of-this column.

There is.

If fewer and fewer people own more and more wealth, the two safest business strategies are to either find goods and services that will appeal to the wealthy, or to sell necessities more cheaply to everyone else.

The world of business has concentrated on “more cheaply” for decades. It’s a well-worn subject and most of the big opportunities were mined out long ago. This has generally translated to capital investments (increased fixed costs) that pay off in low incremental costs (scalable mass production), along with a focus on quality, mostly because high defect rates result in a lot of returns and customers who take their business elsewhere.

Excellence has been a casualty of this relentless focus on incremental cost and high quality, because the more a company tailors, customizes, and adds features and functionality, the more each item costs and the harder it is to prevent defects.

Luxuries — the growth market

Now imagine you’re unimaginably wealthy. (Try to parse that sentence. Go ahead. I dare you!) The question: What are you going to spend your wealth on? Politicians? Sure, go ahead, but once you own a few the enjoyment will pall. After that?

The short phrase is, on luxuries, so if you want to make a profit from the wealthy becoming wealthier, you either create ThePoliticanExchange.com or you sell luxuries nobody else can provide.

Start here: Luxury is comparative, not absolute. What this means: If you live in a neighborhood where most people drive a Toyota, or a Chevy, or a Dodge, if you drive a Lexus you’re the one with a luxury car.

But if you live in a gated community where one neighbor drives a Bentley, another a Maserati, and Mercedes and BMWs are commonplace, your Lexus is just basic transportation.

Luxury is comparative, not absolute. If anyone can have one it isn’t luxury no matter how good it is.

The logical consequence: Uniqueness will be an increasingly important characteristic of successful products and services.

Which is why traditional business processes will increasingly give way to business practices — the domain in which skills, expertise, and judgment trump process standardization, and tailored outcomes trump product simplification.

How about your applications portfolio. Will it support practices that focus on excellence?

Heck, look at your applications methodologies. Do they support the creation of excellent software?

Probably not, because for the most part, tailoring and customization aren’t considered best practice.

Quite the opposite — according to most business theorists, excellence is bad.

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