Comments on: Is “agile enterprise IT” an oxymoron?

By: Peter Evans-Greenwood

Peter Evans-Greenwood — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:43:00 +0000

Standardisation is a tool, rather than a goal, which we often forget.

By: Peter Evans-Greenwood

Peter Evans-Greenwood — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:38:14 +0000

Interesting view, though I'm not sure that it is possible to separate the influence of pilot and IT estate in agility, as your IT tends to reflect your IT organisational structure.

By: Peter Evans-Greenwood

Peter Evans-Greenwood — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:36:12 +0000

Definitely: less is often more. There's an old NASA war story (which a reliable source tells me is true) that NASA spent US$1m+ developing a space pen, while the Russian space program just used pencils. James Gardner is doing a stint working at the welfare front line, and finds that need often drives this sort of jugaad in just the way you describe.

By: tetradian

tetradian — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:51:14 +0000

Interesting indeed.

Seems to me, though, that a true jugaad approach would remember that there are many other forms of 'information technology' besides those that are based on computer systems and computer networks. Pencil and paper, Post-It notes or a simple card-rack work extremely well in a kanban context, for example. I would always prefer to develop new processes by word-of-mouth and scribbled notes at first, and only later start to move the most stable parts of that process onto computer-based IT.

And there also many circumstances where we have no choice but to do information-transfers without computer-based IT. The most obvious of these is a disaster-recovery scenario where the IT is either unavailable, inaccessible or no longer existing - yet somehow we need to be able to continue to run as much of the business as practicable without it.

To identify all of our options here, we must think wider than just computer-based IT.

By: jonayre

jonayre — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:09:12 +0000

Actually, I believe our modern IT solutions and estates are actually unstable and highly agile. Unfortunately the pilots are all now convinced (and have convinced others) that moving the joystick in any direction (to use your plane analogy) is not only dangerous and expensive, but bordering on impossible. This is not the case, but it is a position favoured by IT suppliers who make significant income from this belief and the ensuing extensive test regimes and bums-on-seats mentality to development.

Change the mentality and it's amazing how quickly you can do things without actually changing the underlying IT estate.

Regards
The Enterprising Architect
http://theenterprisingarchitect.blogspot.com

By: Martijn Linssen

Martijn Linssen — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 03:29:14 +0000

Great read Peter, thanks! Absolutely agree. Love the plane analogy, diving into my own here:

The huge error made over the last 10+ years is that we tried to make one what was multiple (not going to cite the Gospel of Thomas here)
Just today I saw my customer wanting to “standardise software components”. Heck no! We have to abandon this Borg-approach and leave our children (apps) alone. We do have to raise them, and educate them. They should speak the Queen's English if need be, but can bar-bar all the way they want if no one's listening.

We shouldn't stiffen what's meant to stay flexible. I love to use languages for pointing out the differences between diversity and standardisation. There is a wild diversity of (in)audible and (n)understandable dialects spoken in Britain, and TG for that. And some of those just will not be understood by US, NL or even other UK people, and that's fine

Another Enterprise problem is its size though. As you'll see, (language and dialect) diversity will increase when size does. And they'll just continue to self-develop (evolve) at a faster pace when the size increases, and distance increases as well (cf UK <-> US <-> AU)

So, a general blanket smoothing all those differences (not eradicating them) is what we need…