I’ve come across two quite interesting recently, both dealing with whether IT and IT projects are strategic or tactical:
- Martin Fowler argues that around 95% of IT projects are utility projects, and only 5% are to be considered strategic
- Neal Ford states that what is strategic to the business always is tactical to IT
Both articles provide valuable insights on what to consider strategic in IT – yet in a totally different way.
Martin Fowler’s “Utility vs. Strategic Dichotomy”
The first, and more recent, article by Martin Fowler is one that IT staff, especially developers, should really have a look at, since it is spot on: Written by a person with enough techie credibility, it points out exactly how IT is supposed to work: most of the time, in most situations, IT has to just work. This “utility” IT needs to first and foremost not get in the way of its users. This lesson is quite hard to learn for IT staff: they know that without their services, their business would essentially stop working, and still all their users want is essentially not know they are there. This seems like injustice – but only on first thought: The same holds true for other business support functions such as finance or HR, and even for really basic infrastructure such as electricity, water or logistics.
In contrast, only very few projects are actually strategic in nature, and can really make a difference in the way the business is run. A highly interesting conclusion from that separation is that the two types of projects should be run differently to account for the differences in where their opportunities and risks are.
Neal Ford’s “Tactics vs. Strategy”
Neal Ford’s article, which I found because it is linked from the previously discussed one, is also interesting – but from a totally different perspective, namely because it is a vivid example of the misunderstandings between business and IT. The article centers around the notion that what is strategic to the business, is tactical to IT, because the business can change its direction in a two hour meeting, while IT can’t adapt that fast. This statement, however, is wrong on multiple levels, which I will discuss in the following.
1. No business can change in a two hour meeting. This is not because strategic business decisions require preparation of more than two hours (which they do, by the way), but because that change has to be implemented throughout the company, with IT being a part of it. Let’s for example consider the strategic decision to start servicing customers in more than one country: granted, this decision might have a strong impact on the IT landscape because so far customer data was stored without a country. However, it impacts the rest of the company as well: staff in the other country needs to be hired, offices rented, managers installed etc. All of these activities together form the implementation of the strategy.
2. The IT function can (and should) have a strategy too. IT managers too can take two hour long meetings. And not only that, they (hopefully) also can decide on the long term direction of their function. They should of course link their strategy as tightly to the business strategy as possbile, but developing a vision of a future state of the IT landscape and a plan to get there is essential to prevent the IT function from acting just tactically, which will only ensure that the whole IT landscape will get ever messier.
3. Business strategy changes don’t come out of thin air, they are elaborated over a long time. The last point is the most important one, actually, since it highlights the gap between “business” and “IT”. Neal Ford writes:
No matter how much effort you put into a comprehensive, beautiful, well-designed enterprise architecture, it’ll be blown out of the water the first time the business makes a decision unlike the ones that came before.
While this is certainly true, it shows that any strategic decision, be it on the business or on the IT side, should closely involve stakeholders from the respective “other” side. This will make sure that implications of decisions are considered as early in the process as possible. Of course, the fact that the current IT architecture doesn’t fit with a proposed business change probably won’t keep the business from changing (since the world is, anyway!) – but considering potential options and their impact before taking a strategic decisions will make a difference and ensure that IT and business are equally well prepared for their strategic challenge.
Tags: Business, IT function, Strategy