Informatica Enterprise Data Management

It’s been almost 5 years since Nicolas Carr started a lively (and sometimes hostile) debate with his Harvard Business Review article IT Doesn’t Matter. And now, just this past fall, Cynthia Rettig added fuel to the fire with her MIT Sloan Management Review paper The Trouble with Enterprise Software. There are indeed serious concerns with the perception of IT and many business leaders are fed up. You don’t need to look very hard to find evidence of trouble. The Standish Group has been tracking IT project success rates for years and the findings are dismal. The 2004 Standish CHAOS report found that only 29% of all IT projects succeeded while the remainder were either challenged or failed. Cynthia Rettig in her paper writes:

“As a percentage of total investment, IT rose from 2.6% to 3.5% between 1970 and 1980. By 1990 IT consumed 9%, and by 1999 a whopping 22% of total investment went to IT. Growth in IT spending has fallen off, but it is nonetheless surprising to hear that today’s IT departments spend 70% to 80% of their budgets just trying to keep existing systems running.”

So while IT is gobbling up larger and larger amounts of investment spending, it seems to be doing so in a way that is expensive to maintain and difficult to change.

Consider this, why is it that the Gartner Hype Cycle is such a well-accepted pattern; that technologies go through a cycle that includes the “peak of inflated expectations”, “the trough of disillusionment” and finally the “plateau of productivity”. It seems that the industry has a habit of over-promising and under-delivering so it’s hard not to blame business users for being cynical about any new technology.

By the way, Gartner missed a key phase in their technology hype cycle; the “pit of obscurity”. Some technologies never reach the plateau of productivity and instead fade away until they are just a distant memory of the IT old-timers. Whatever happened to AI (Artificial Intelligence) or 4GL (fourth generation language)? They are now in the pit along with a host of other silver bullets.

I respect both Carr and Rettig for helping to shine a light on the “Moose on the table” (the big ugly thing in the room that no one wants to talk about). If the industry is going to solve the problem, we need to make it visible and tackle it head-on. By the “industry”, I don’t just mean technology suppliers; we need corporate IT groups, academic organizations, standards bodies and government agencies all working together.

Both Carr and Rettig stop short of offering any solutions to the trouble. Carr takes the “necessary evil” point of view and simply suggests spending less on IT and outsourcing as much as possible. This doesn’t really solve the root cause issues and is simply avoiding the problem. Rettig suggests closer communication between business and IT and that executives should educate themselves more about technology. Good advice, but it’s a bit like saying if you want your food cooked right, you need to go to culinary school so that you can cook it yourself.

So what is the solution? At the risk of sounding pretentious, I’d like to suggest that there is a silver bullet solution. The answer is not more technology – we have plenty of technology and quite frankly, most of the core technical challenges were addressed by the 1980’s. The wave after wave of new technologies over the past 20 years are mostly incremental improvements over long-standing practices. Don’t get me wrong, there have been amazing developments in the past 20 years such as the low cost and tremendous capacity of the modern PC and the World Wide Web which is arguably the largest application in the world.

What I am talking about are the fundamental disciplines of managing change in an IT environment. Specifically, Information Architecture, Program Management, Systems Integration and Configuration Management. The silver bullet solution to today’s IT complexity is to simply perform these four practice areas in a disciplined fashion. And the interesting thing is you don’t even need to buy the latest IT Management Best Seller to learn the techniques – if you follow the advice of The Mythical Man-Month, first written by Fred Brooks in 1975, you will have 80% of the Silver Bullet solution. In his book, Brooks talks about his insights for how to effectively build large-scale integrated systems that require many teams consisting of hundreds, or even thousands, of staff working in a cohesive manner. His advice is as applicable today for a large-scale enterprise IT department consisting of hundreds or thousands of staff working to build an integrated enterprise system that meets the business needs.

Note that I didn’t list Software Engineering as one of the 4 pillars of the real Silver Bullet. The reason is that the industry was doing a good job of software engineering 30 years ago and is still doing a good job today. The development languages have changed and the tools have evolved, but fundamentally, the discipline of writing software is not a root cause of the trouble that Cynthia Rettig speaks of, or the frustration that Nicholas Carr writes about. The root cause is lack of discipline (read leadership) in the practice of architecture, integration, program management, and change management. If an organization was to focus on these four practice areas, put their strongest leaders in charge of them, and invest in training and tools for the staff, then the hype cycle will disappear.