IT - WHITHER THOU GOEST?

IT – Whither Thou Goest?

By W H Inmon

Just today there appeared an article in the WSJ that was really interesting. The article was It’s Time to get rid of the IT department, by Joe Peppard. If you haven’t read it I really recommend that you do.

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One of the points raised in the article is – how and why did the IT department get divorced from the business it operates in? Now that is a very good question.

Like most widespread phenomenon, there is not one single answer. Instead, there is a whole panoply of answers.

One of the factors is that the IT department’s success is not measured in the same way as classical business success. IT is measured on such things as response time, transactions run, system availability, installation of new systems, etc. Business on the other hand is measured on such things as profitability, new customers, revenue growth, and so forth. There simply is little or no connection between what IT considered important and what business considers important.

But there are other factors.

Consider this. For years IT management bought into the “silver bullet”. Every crazy silver bullet the vendor brought into IT, IT management bought hook, line, and sinker. The problem was that 99% of these silver bullets were harem scarum ideas that never panned out. Yet IT management took the corporation right down the expensive garden path. The business got tired of financing the IT experiments that were never examined closely and never worked. Business wanted results, not broken promises.

Another sign of the weakness of IT management was the fact that IT management followed vendors like a Pavlovian puppy dog. IT management thought the vendor was telling them good business advice. Instead, the vendor was just selling more product. IT management could not distinguish good advice from a sales pitch.

Where else in the world does a manager need the approval of a consulting company in order to make a purchase? Yet IT management does exactly that. They support a whole cadre of industry analysts that make pronouncements on the fitness of technology. But a close look behind the covers shows that most of those industry analysts receive money from the very companies that they are supposedly analyzing. Now how objective do you think those recommendations are? Yet IT management follows the analysts around like an animal that is being led by its nose.

Admittedly there are a lot of other factors. It is true that technology is changing all the time. Keeping up with technology is a full time job. Another factor is that there has been no formal preparation for making managerial decisions for IT. There has long been preparation for doctors, accountants and engineers. But there simply has been no formal preparation for the management of IT. It was as if one day technology descended on the earth and whoever happened to be convenient in the corporation was tapped for being the IT manager.

To summarize matters…. Several years ago, I was talking with a technician at a large telecommunications firm. I mentioned the word “customer” to him. To my surprise he said “customer”? What’s that? Do we have them?

And I am not joking. That really happened.

The lunatics are running the asylum.

Bill Inmon – the father of data warehousing has a firm – Forest Rim Technology - that reads and analyzes text and turns that text into a data base. Bill is based in Denver, Colorado