System Transformation Portal

Net Strategy Must Include Discipline 

by William Ulrich
(Originally published in Computerworld Magazine on August 21, 2000)

Since the early 1970s, IT has created and deployed numerous methods, processes and standards. The ongoing refinement of these information management disciplines has gradually shifted IT from an art to a science. As a result, IT has matured as an industry. But Internet deployment efforts, focusing on rapid implementation at any cost, threaten to undo this progress. Therefore, IT must incorporate information management disciplines into Internet initiatives or risk creating an unmanageable legacy of Web-based applications for generations to come. 

IT has come a long way in a short time. Less than 50 years old, it's a young industry. By contrast, the architectural engineering industry has been around thousands of years. Architects and engineers create structural specifications and coordinate the process of building physical infrastructures with construction teams. Based on this, buildings should remain standing once finished. 

The IT industry, on the other hand, didn't enlist architects to define requirements and design specifications until the 1970s. Until then, programmers received requests and wrote code, creating complex technical infrastructures with no architectural blueprints. Systems evolved through piecemeal requests, with little regard to an overall plan. Today's legacy systems, in many cases redundant, fragmented and fragile, are a monument to this period in IT's history. 

Once IT reached a point where architectural design was an accepted discipline, methodologies exploded onto the scene to guide developers through the software development cycle. Early methodologies were cumbersome and too granular. In some cases,
this resulted in "analysis paralysis," and in others, methodologies were ignored. 

IT is now leaning toward "light" methodologies, which offer structural guidelines that allow practitioners to fill in the details. 

Over the years, IT has put disciplines in place to address design, development, testing, production, maintenance and other elements essential to the stability of an information environment. Yet Internet development environments, particularly where work is done outside the realm of IT, pay little heed to these disciplines. 

Internet developers may argue that the technology is too new, the requirements too dynamic and the pressures too great to bother with formal disciplines. But unstable business and technological conditions don't eliminate the need for discipline. Rather, they heighten it. Internet disciplines include defining business and technical requirements, assessing design impacts, creating back-end system and data-integration standards, determining capacity levels, segregating test systems from production and coordinating development and maintenance cycles. 

Internet project disciplines also extend to strategic requirements. IT has learned to avoid creating technical solutions that haven't been synchronized with the overall business strategy, and this also applies to Internet initiatives. Consider a marketing unit that established an e-commerce site to sell products over the Internet, while another business unit joined an industry consortium to sell products through an electronic marketplace. The marketing unit's site may violate participation in the consortium and may be a waste of time and resources.  

This scenario highlights the importance of managing all IT activities under a set of disciplines that address the big picture and the details. Regardless of whether Internet initiatives are launched internally, stem from a dot-com acquisition or are part of an industry consortium, they should still fall under the IT umbrella.

Organizations should craft strategies where IT disciplines can be deployed across all internal and external Internet initiatives. External initiatives include consortiums and outsourced projects and require oversight to ensure that they use appropriate methods and standards. Yet this oversight could spark a political backlash from Internet developers who feel their creativity is being stifled. IT must address this to ensure the quality and integrity of these efforts. 

Regardless, IT disciplines are very important. Organizations ignoring the need to disseminate these disciplines to business units and external partners risk creating redundant, fragmented Internet systems that will be difficult to maintain over the long term. And this could curtail Internet deployment efforts for years to come.