The IT-landscape has become so complex that it should be understood and managed as an eco-system (3/5)
5 Challanges every company must tackle to become technology-enabled:3/5 The IT-landscape has become so complex that it should be understood and managed as an eco-system.
Floris de Bruin
Mirjam Hachem
&samhoud
In the race towards digitalization, large traditional organizations are set under pressure by smaller, highly adaptive and disruptive companies. To stay viable in the digital age, large organizations have to evolve from being technology-supported to being technology-enabled. To carry out this transformation successfully, large companies need to turn their IT departments from costly support stations into engines for innovation and profit. This is achieved by the implementation of business-IT convergence in which the separation of business and IT-units is abandoned and the two are merged together into one functioning organism. In our practice, we have identified five fundamental challenges large companies have to overcome to become technology-enabled.
Challenge 3: The IT-landscape has become so complex that it should be understood and managed as an eco-system.
Large companies in all sectors are dealing with highly complex and vulnerable IT-systems. These systems are a mix of old structures at the fundament, layers and layers of structure added over several decades and new shiny applications and gadgets on top. This complexity is usually summarized under the term IT- landscape which conjures up an image of a peaceful and structured situation. In reality, these ‘landscapes’ consist of thousands and thousands of components with an intricate web of linkages between them. These components and their interfaces need to be maintained and upgraded. This is especially complicated as many of them are serviced by different suppliers who have their own maintenance and upgrading agenda. Since everything is linked, each upgrade or change in one place can cause major problems in other places of the system. The term IT-landscape is therefore misleading. IT can better be described as an eco-system or biotope (Roeltgen 2006) which is unique to each organization.
It is important to be aware that a high level of complexity is to a certain extent inherent to IT and therefore unavoidable. This is because IT as a market is currently transitioning into a new phase. There are so many different standards and languages that for most software packages it is still difficult to communicate to other software packages, meaning that customized interfaces need to be build. Software packages themselves are becoming more and more complex too. Packages like SAP have so many components that anybody claiming they can reliably estimate how much time it takes to implement had either unlimited resources for an impact analysis or should be fired immediately. In the same way that the introduction of a new species into an eco-system leads to unforeseeable consequences, organizations cannot accurately predict what happens when a new software application is introduced to the existing system. They can at best make an educated guess.
That being said, most organizations are dealing with a much larger amount of IT complexity than necessary. This complexity is the result of many suboptimal solutions being implemented in favor of short-term cost reduction but at the expense of simplicity and stability, which leads to a cost increase in the long run. What we see is that business leaders are reluctant to face and accept this reality and IT is unsuccessful in communicating it effectively, resulting in continued misalignment and dissatisfaction.
In our article Business-IT convergence: 5 transformation challenges every company must tackle to become technology-enabled we provide a detailed discussion about the obstacles that large organizations need to overcome to evolve successfully into the digital age.
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