The "Business" of IT

Over in the Twitterverse, Andrew van der Stock (@vanderaj) posts this

Our hoster is booting us out during a DDoS attack. Security vendors, beware moving into the cloud with security servers. Hosters suck

The immediate lesson to those looking to the "Cloud" to solve their problems, is that yes its all well and good to commoditize computing and vendors, *but* in the same way you the customer commoditize the the computing environment to the Cloud, you the customer are commoditized as well! In other words, a Cloud vendors has many, many customers, why would they want to make the same money for one hosting one company or site that causes them headaches? Easier to just boot them.

So commoditization cuts both ways, law of unintended consequences.

Should we be surprised by this? Not really, here is John Hagel:

Three business types

In brief, most companies today are still an unnatural bundle of three fundamentally different, and often competing, business types:

• Infrastructure management businesses – high volume, routine processing activities like running basic assembly line manufacturing, logistics networks or routine customer call centers
• Product innovation and commercialization businesses – developing, introducing and accelerating the adoption of innovative new products and services
• Customer relationship businesses – building deep relationships with a target set of customers, getting to know them very well and using that knowledge to become increasingly helpful in sourcing the products and services that are most relevant and useful to them

Hagel has proven correct, the Cloud vendors are delivering large scale infrastructure management - huge volumes, relatively low cost transactional environment. But this is not a Customer relationship business - its a throughput business. If you have 150 customers all paying the same and one causes you 25x work, what level would you go to support that customer? Maybe you are ok putting in 2-3x more work on behalf of them, but 25x for the same price for a utility type business? Seems doubtful. 

So is customer service for Cloud an IT concern or business concern? Richard Bejtlich posted this week on the train wreck that is and always has been IT chargebacks. This is a symptom of a deeper issue - the IT and "Business' separation.

In the old days when computers were introduced to businesses, they were something special, you needed a high priests to run your COBOL, write you JCL, run the reports. You needed IBM or other vendors to hold your hand every step of the scary journey, and most important it was something outside of the core business.

But if you were starting a business from scratch today, you would never think of computing as something other than the business, you would know out of the gate that computing is implicit to everything the business does. The separation of Business and IT is an historical accident and its well past its sell by date. What matters today is who is doing

• Product or Service Development - identifying requirements, doing design, strategy, listening to customer needs, figuring out how to go to market, doing detailed design and coding
• Deployment - promoting the system into production, managing change and environments
• Operations - running the system, monitoring usage, reporting

The point is that it matters not whether these tasks are done by "business" or "IT" and the separation of these two, far from helping, is actually harmful. It sets up false decisions points.

A much better strategy is to combine "Business" and "IT" into these teams, use same bonus and incentives plans to show you are serious. You would be surprised how effectively these two different cultures can work together when incentivized to do so.

There is no need for separating IT and Business, in the old days, most people in business did not use or understand computers. Then when they did it was only simple business applications. Now, pretty much everyone in the business uses computers, smartphones, tablets and so on. In fact their home computers are very likely more powerful than their work computers. The separation model is outdated, the business is now saying - where are smartphones? Why can't I bring my iPhone to work? Why can't I use my more powerful laptop at work?

The major point to think about here is the skill and power curve has fundamentally changed, business users do "develop" for computing environments (as Dan Geer says Excel is the most widely used programming language in the world), "business" users consume and require sophisticated technology, there is little to gain by separating and arbitrarily isolating them from IT and there is a lot of confusion generated by the separation.

So I say, "Mr. CIO - tear down that wall!"

Comments

[Devremülkler]

Nice post. I love it. Waiting your new posts. Thank you...