Blogger: Lyn Robison
Enterprise IT is expensive -- more expensive than it needs to be. And, to make matters worse, enterprise IT groups can’t seem to deliver results that satisfy the business. So, who is in favor of cutting IT costs and delivering better results?
A famous man once said, “Often, our own misconceptions are all that prevent us from accomplishing great things.” This quote has direct bearing on the problems we face in enterprise IT. IMHO, the misconceptions held by people in enterprise IT are all that prevent them from cutting IT costs and delivering results that will satisfy their business constituents.
We in enterprise IT tend to think that we have to build lots of application software, that we must build it quickly, and that we need to use the most powerful tools to do it. These misconceptions are making IT expensive and are preventing us from delivering satisfactory results to the business.
An IT department incurs huge technical debt with every piece of software that it writes, because every line of code must be designed, written, tested, debugged, secured, integrated, documented, supported, maintained, upgraded, and ultimately retired. Because of its cost, the production of custom code in enterprise IT should be minimized instead of maximized. To minimize the production of custom code, I submit the following modest proposal for your consideration:
Instead of implementing new applications, just change whatever has to be changed at your enterprise to make the data inside of the existing systems better and more useful to businesspeople. If you follow this simple advice, your IT costs will go down because you won’t be doing costly software development projects. And the business’s satisfaction with IT will go up, because the businesspeople will be getting the information they need to do their jobs.
That part about changing “whatever has to be changed at your enterprise to make the data inside of the existing systems better” is the part where you have to let go of your misconceptions. Just let them go. You’ll feel better and IT will achieve much higher levels of success in your enterprise.
BTW, MODS is an ideal way to go about implementing this modest proposal.
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