Is there Glory left in corporate IT?
Idle... this is what IT stakeholders seem like these days, at least in my recent observations within the large enterprise world. On the edge of IT, things are bubbling and more of the coolest things ever are being tested and popping up on an hourly basis, and that's not about to stop - but within business cases I've encountered lately, there is an alarming lack of creativity in IT solutions proposed - which is quite paradoxical... Why does it seem so hard for corporations to harness benefits ($) from IT advances occurring daily, in a basement near them.
Even more worrisome, within real-life business situations, from complex data architecture scenarios to somewhat simple eCommerce applications, the IT tasks force at hand seem to have a tremendous amount of difficulty to actually make good business use of the technology available today. And by that, I mean the tried, tested, debugged and robust solutions, that have yielded results (uptime and dollars) for quite some years now. So what's eating our IT staff's grape.
Outsourcing did, secretly, only a few years ago. And guess what, they're hungry again.
We seem to be reaching a tipping point, when it comes to IT business decisions that will have meaningful market repercussions. Here's the scenario: Mid to large businesses are driving most of the IT needs. [Yes, there is a long-tail for smaller yet increasingly agile businesses that are actually looking for rich IT applications; we'll get to them in another post - don't interrupt]. So as I was saying, the mid to large segment has the biggest need/stomach/wallet for IT services. Ironically, their need could only be satisfied by the IBM,CA ,Microsoft and CGI type of partners a few years back and off they signed multi-year, multi-millions (or hundred of millions) deals to out source business critical IT applications and services to them.
Here's the issue: During setup of these massive IT infrastructures, came a little disruptive notion called "the online user experience". It was, and in many cases still is, complete jibborish to IT analysts or programmers. The result was that clients of the IT outsourcing body shops were growing increasingly concerned with the ability of their enormously expensive and inflexible platforms to support better, richer, more customizable and more rapidly deployable front end services to their increasingly demanding online customers. Indeed, when you've purchased a song on itunes, or posted your latest journey pictures on flickr, buying a new home insurance policy or even doing your online banking can seem utterly repulsive to do online.
To cater to this growing issue and provide better online experience, service offerings, and navigation closer to what the brand should "feel", the response from the mid to large businesses was (in the past 24 months) to hire IT resources and try to internalize the IT knowledge. It was believe at the time that it would enable corporations to reclaim control of their IT infrastructure and deliver better online experience.
Here's the kicker: By the time they finally figured out how to play with the platforms built for "their business", "according to their requirements" and realized in how much trouble they were, consumers were getting net savvy and therefore demanding, twice as fast. One of my favorite expression these days when IT stakeholders are asked what kind of solution can be built on the existing platform, the most common behaviour is the "deer in the headlights" reaction... (have to plug the fact that i'm a proud Canadian, eh).
My bottom line is the following: Some IT ships seem dead in the water to me these days (stalled by anchors composed of code heaviness and incredible costs to enhance existing apps) and that's scary as the Internet is becoming a critical point of interaction for consumers. Your Web properties are now recognized as a live, relevant and accurate portrait of how your business is working, and what it's all about.
So much that your internal marketing departments are actually catching on and finally asking for faster development cycles, open source and Ajax type of apps to deliver better sales through improved online experience, consistent with its offline marketing activities. IT owners are facing today a key decision: How do I cope with their needs?
"Outsourcing is the answer" is being whispered in your ears, and most of you will go at it again, you daft founded CIO's... you know who you are. Seem that some lessons are never meant to be learnt.
Some will see the light and realize what can be done today with faster, more agile yet reliable wiz-IT-grown ups, not kids. Imagine what they will do tomorrow.
Avdv.