Technology delivery: is at all different or mostly the same?

I’ve had a few conversations lately about approaches to simplifying complex and disparate technology landscapes which is particularly important for us as we continue our path of convergence and delivery of common platforms across multiple organisations.

Over the years and across a number of roles I’ve found there can be many systems doing the same thing, some bent out of shape to accommodate requirements they were never designed to fulfil, EUC services that end up with way more configurations than needed, umpteen different CRM systems etc.

Even with good architectural principles and controls in place the “but we’re different” argument often wins out when the pressure to achieve an outcome at pace is on, or in some instances it’s just a case of inheriting through acquisition or other circumstance.

The reasons are many and varied and rarely by design.

What I’ve generally found is that many of the challenges we face are pretty similar across sectors with the context being key. My leadership team and I have spent a lot of time talking to many different companies across a range of sectors, when you boil it down there are often more similarities than there are differences.

As CIO’s it’s rare we get the opportunity to totally re-imagine an entire estate, so, in an effort to simplify what can often be very complex environments I loosely grouped services into 3 layers in an effort to simplify, drive commonality, reduce cost and speed up delivery -amongst other benefits. It's also helped investment decisions through standardisation, reuse and better visibility of outcomes.

Utility – those services that ought to be standard and consistent across your organisation; EUC, hosting, print, cyber etc

Common – services that may need to have an element of common capability but also some differentiation; workflow, case management, grants, helpdesk, correspondence etc

Bespoke – those things that are needed to fulfil a very specific use case or outcome

What we can end up with is an inverted pyramid where you end up with more different things than you do standard.

What we’re working towards us flipping that and trying to make more utility services, with a constant review to see how we can move bespoke to common and common to utility.

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It’s this approach we’ve tried to take when setting up a digital shared service across multiple organisations and has been the basis of some of our previous EUC delivery. Our platform approach and use of SaaS/PaaS with a drive towards use of common patterns and blueprints should help take this further. We're happy to take those patterns as well as share ours more widely

It’s by no means perfect of right for every organisation but in an effort to reduce overheads, simplify and maximise investment it’s providing a useful framework to explain where we're heading and why we're doing certain things.

The more difficult part is driving the same standardisation or commonality across business processes and operations but that’s a slightly different sell!