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|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:

Are you tired of the phrase “perfect storm”?

Me too. But tired or not, one is hitting IT right now. Several interconnected trends are affecting the business world in ways that will … and should … radically redefine IT’s role. Among them:

Cloud 3.0

Cloud 1.0 was playing with cheap or free stuff, notably but not limited to Amazon Web Services. Because Cloud 1.0 services were cheap or free, the IT pundit class concluded Cloud computing was going to be dramatically more economical than owned infrastructure.

Cloud 2.0 consists of (present tense because it’s going strong) important but standalone systems. Salesforce is an example. While Salesforce is integratable, most Salesforce implementations were and are standalone “islands of automation” to use a quaint phrase from a bygone era. Cloud 2.0 wasn’t/isn’t cheap or free.

Cloud 3.0 is serious enterprise-class computing that makes use of Cloud services and architecture. By serious, I mean it has the same characteristics as projects IT is accustomed to dealing with. Cloud 3.0 provides systems that are integrated into the rest of the applications and information portfolio; they make use of the enterprise directory service for identity management; and they’re subjected to the same rigorous software quality assurance and change control protocols as systems that run on owned infrastructure.

IT could ignore Cloud 1.0 and Cloud 2.0. Cloud 3.0? IT will be neck-deep in Cloud 3.0 projects whether it takes the lead or is dragged into them, kicking and screaming.

Shadow IT

Shadow IT isn’t so much a second, separate trend as it is the flip side of the Cloud coin.

Gartner has famously predicted that by 2017, marketing departments will have bigger IT budgets than IT departments and marketing isn’t the only department outside IT that buys information technology independently. Sales is an obvious example, routinely signing contracts with Salesforce.com without asking IT’s permission first (see Cloud 2.0, above).

Here’s what’s rarely mentioned: Companies have invested large amounts of time, effort, and political capital developing IT governance processes. Depending who you ask and after how much beer, this is either because companies want to gain maximum business advantage from their investments in information technology, or because business executives don’t trust IT do anything other than play with the latest and greatest shiny ball unless the rest of the business supervises it closely.

So here’s the question: Given that Marketing doesn’t, in most companies, have a strong reputation for tight cost discipline, does anyone really think CEOs are going to give Marketing, or any other department for that matter, a free rein when it comes to its non-IT IT spending?

Me neither.

The digital enterprise

Okay, okay. Yes, this is one of those so-visionary-it-might-be hallucination buzzphrases. Except that, shorn of its buzzphrasey trendiness there’s a lot of current reality behind it. In particular, there’s the rise of smart products that don’t keep their smarts to themselves — products that constantly collect data and communicate it to what I sure hope we soon stop calling “big data” repositories through what I hope even more we stop calling “the Internet of things.”

From IT’s perspective, this is a big, big deal, because …

Back in the day, most companies that sold technology products kept internal IT and product-development IT separate. Merge them and either the company would soon consist of nothing but cobbler’s children as product development sucked all of the priority out of internal support projects, or products would become second-rate as internal priorities had the opposite impact.

That worked when product IT and internal IT had no technological point of contact.

But smart products that send data to internal databases for use in customer support and marketing analytics are seriously smudging the line separating internal and external IT.

Politically, CIOs might win biggest by sitting this dance out, watching product development, marketing, and customer service duke it out in the silo wars, then riding in as the white knight that can pull it all together. After all, most business executives value solutions much more than they value prevention.

Another reason to wait on the sidelines: The most obvious organizational solution for all this — a dramatic expansion of central IT — would look like empire building should you propose it.

But waiting on the sidelines is the opposite of leadership.

Fortunately, there’s a better solution. Unfortunately, we’re out of space for this week.

So stay tuned.

* * *

Six years ago I published one of the most important columns I ever wrote — “The portal,” describing a better way to think about personal computers, although if I wrote it today I’d add tablets and smartphones.

And eighteen years ago, in InfoWorld’s “IS Survival Guide,” I took my first shot at the difference between productivity and effectiveness.

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