It soon became clear that there was no overall vision about where the IT department was heading.
I’ve talked about guerrilla IT previously [Guerillas in the midst, T&B, March 2006] and I return to the topic in this issue in a feature article on guerrilla strategy and planning [page 52]. It’s a very powerful metaphor for IT transformation in our current economic environment. Guerrilla tactics are all about subverting the dominant paradigm and reorganising the playing field, and we are seeing every day through new dot-com success stories how effective this approach can be.
It’s clear that the Australian IT industry is gathering strength again. Job vacancies are up and project activity is increasing. At the same time there are some very significant new technologies that promise to revitalise the corporate IT environment and the ebusiness experience. These technologies are likely to have a major impact on your IT strategy and this is the time to start updating that strategy and drawing together your battle plans.
If you’ve been fighting a long, drawn out, war of attrition then these new technologies may offer the opportunity to refresh those strategies and spearhead new offensives. Otherwise you could find yourself standing alone on an abandoned battlefield that has lost all strategic significance.
Of course one of the biggest difficulties with strategically focused projects is measuring their value.
The value from enterprise architecture (EA) programs, for instance, is notoriously difficult to measure. Consequently, enterprise architects are always asking “how do we sell EA?”.
One of my most revealing experiences came when I was working for a well-known financial services organisation where I was developing a three-year technology plan. As I met with the various department heads to learn about their needs, desires and plans, it soon became clear that there was no overall vision about where the IT department was heading.
Furthermore, there was no overall understanding of what the current IT environment looked like! I explained that sure, I could come up with a technology plan, but without an enterprise architecture its value would always be limited. To make this point clear I took to carrying a one-page model of an enterprise architecture around with me to all these meetings and whenever an opportunity arose, I would pull out this model and explain what an EA was and how it would help the business.
Almost without exception the managers and department heads agreed that the development of an EA sounded like a very worthwhile project. However, it was clear that not one of these managers was going to sponsor such a project.
One day, while talking to the CIO, I instinctively pulled out this model and explained the value of an EA to his company. His face lit up, he responded that he had a company board meeting in eight weeks time and asked what I could have up and running by then. I showed him what we could do using a guerrilla EA development approach and by the time the board meeting came around the CIO had an impressive EA system that demonstrated how the IT department was in control and planning for the future.
What I learnt from this experience was the importance of targeting the right project champions. While all of the executives I spoke to could see how an EA would be useful, the CIO immediately understood the strategic importance of such a tool. Furthermore, while the executives were supportive of an EA program, the extensive nature of such a program meant that it fell outside of their mandates and outside their spheres of influence. Only the CIO had the resources and mandate to initiate an enterprise-wide program such as this. Sometimes it pays to aim high.
Gerald Khoury consults, lectures and writes in IT strategy and planning.
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