Blogger: Lyn Robison
This might be a bit of an understatement, but enterprise IT is no longer flush with cash. Will enterprises continue to fund big IT implementations? Probably not as much as they used to. Will enterprises keep IT implementers that are idle on the payroll? Probably not as much as they used to. What will IT implementers do to keep themselves from being idle?
It appears to me that in these lean economic times, there are just two kinds of implementers in enterprise IT: the dinosaurs and the mammals.
The dinosaurs are the ones who continue to look for big IT projects to work on, systems to implement, software to develop, and initiatives to pursue, but who remain idle while they are looking and hoping for that big score. They refuse to change their mindset away from implementing new systems or doing major upgrades or building service oriented architectures that dynamically integrate complex business processes. They write business cases and try to get them approved, but in this economic climate, the business cases don’t get approved and the dinosaurs get cut from the payroll.
The mammals are the ones who, without big IT funding, find ways to make existing IT systems more useful. The meteor has hit the Yucatan, and the world is changing, and the mammals know how to adapt. These IT mammals see that businesspeople pay for IT systems to get the information, so they focus on information, instead of systems, technology, software, and architectures like the dinosaurs do.
For example, the IT mammals will identify enterprise data types: pieces of data that are used by multiple IT systems. They will talk to the businesspeople to find out what information the business requires within this data type. The mammals will identify instances of the data type already existing in the current IT systems, reconcile those instances and their identifiers (primary keys, whatever), and place entries for those instances in an inexpensive registry of some type. This way, when a businessperson sees, for example, data that refers to “Customer ABC123” in one system, they will know that it is the same as “Customer 47” in another system. This lets the businesspeople begin to do cross-system joins with enterprise information, and the existing IT systems across the enterprise become more useful to businesspeople.
Mammals can do this type of work without a big IT project, without writing new software, without getting lots of IT funding, and their efforts pay dividends to the business right away. Mammals are willing and able to work only with the data. They do data modeling, they help users with data quality, they document data lineage, they help the security folks with information classification, and they establish data governance processes for the businesspeople to use. A dinosaur can’t do this type of work, because an IT dinosaur will only work with technology. They don’t know how to work with data and they refuse to learn. You don’t want to be that dinosaur.
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