Stop Treating the Symptoms and Treat the Disease?
Why do executives spend millions of dollars treating symptoms of systemic information ailments instead of treating the disease? These symptoms include a lack of data and functional integration, inadequate real-time support for customers, sales people and other front-line users, the inability to deliver relevant information to users when they need it and a loss of competitive advantage to more nimble competitors.
How have we addressed these challenges? IT has created data warehouses and put graphical front-ends onto mainframe systems as a way of integrating disparate business functions. Business users generated countless spreadsheets, 4th generation programs and mirror images of production data that can be manipulated outside the purview of the information management function. These efforts are being shadowed by multi-million dollar replacement projects aimed at implementing enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages containing an endless array of processing rules that may or may not address strategic business requirements.
How these projects were deployed is equally disconcerting. A Standish Group International study said that most IT projects are late or never even delivered at all. While this problem stems in part from executives that cannot get behind an information migration plan, IT cannot be held harmless. IT has been seeking silver bullet solutions ever since we heard that 4th generation languages would eliminate the need for programmers by the late 1980’s. Other failed silver bullets include Computer-Aided Software Engineering tools, the promise that client/server systems would replace mainframes and one-size-fits-all ERP solutions.
Technologists, responding to growing competitive demands, have wrapped a spider web of poorly documented interfaces around legacy systems. And now companies plan to connect these convoluted architectures to the Internet. One company created a web site that allowed customers to enter orders via the Internet. Behind the scenes however, users had to access this web-entered data and re-key it into a CICS mainframe system. This is the ultimate example of technology driving business strategy.
How did we end up in this situation? It began with senior executives unwilling to look beyond quarterly profit margins long enough to fund strategic migration projects. In fact, the opposite occurred. During the 1990’s, CIO’s were rewarded based on how much they could cut from the IT budget. This resulted in the loss of senior business analysts and the hiring of young coding jockeys with little knowledge of core business requirements.
Corporate IT punished strategic thinking while rewarding the illusion of technological progress. How can organizations stem this tide? The first step is to shift away from a culture of bandages and silver bullets. Realigning systems architectures to deliver information when needed is a goal that can only be achieved with sustained support from top management. ERP solutions and the Internet are part of the answer. But strategic planning should precede knee-jerk acquisition of new technology or software packages.
Companies must assess business plans, design information architectures that support deployment of those plans, integrate information management activities and draft transition plans to acquire, build and/or renovate legacy systems to achieve these goals. This requires analysts to tackle aging architectures head-on instead of sidestepping them. Companies that address these issues will leverage technology into the next millennium, while those that continue treating the symptoms of systemic chaos will be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.