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The other week I had a go at capturing the rules of enterprise IT[1]. The starting point was a few of those beery discussions we all have after work, where we came to wonder how the game of enterprise IT was changing. It’s the common refrain of big-to-small, the Sieble to Saleforce.com transition which sees the need for IT services (internal or external) change dramatically. The rules of IT are definitely changing. Now that I’ve had a go at old rules, I thought I’d have a go at seeing what the new rules might be.

As I mentioned before, enterprise IT has historically been seen as an asset management function, a production line for delivering large IT assets into the IT estate and then maintaining them. The rules are the therefore rules of business operations. My attempt at capturing 4 ± 2 rules (with friends) produced the following (in no particular order):

• Keep the lights on. Much like being a trucker, the trick is to keep the truck rolling (and avoid spending money on tyres). Otherwise known as smooth running applications are the ticket to the strategy table.
• Save money. Business IT was born as a cost saving exercise (out with the rooms full of people, in with the punch card machines), and most IT business cases are little different.
• Build what you need. I wouldn’t be surprised if the team building LEO[2] blew their own valve tubes. You couldn’t buy parts of the shelf so you had to make everything. This is still with us in some organisations’ strong desire to build – or at least heavily customise – solutions.
• Keep the outside outside. We trust whatever’s inside our four walls, while deploying security measures to keep the evil outside. This creates an us (employees) and them (customers, partners, and everyone else) mentality.

Things have changed since these rules were first laid down. From another post of mine on a similar topic[3] (somewhat trimmed and edited):

The recent global financial criss has fundamentally changed the business landscape, with many are even talking about the emergence of a new normal[4]. We’ve also seen the emergence of outsource, offshore, cloud computing, SaaS, Enterprise 2.0 and so much more.

Companies are becoming more focused, while leaning more heavily on partners and services companies (BPO, out-sourcers, consultants, and so on) to cover those areas of the business they don’t want to focus on. We can see this from the global companies who have effectively moved to a franchise model, though to the small end of town where startups are using on-line services such as Amazon S3, rather than building their own internal capabilities.

We’re also seeing more rapid business change: what used to take years now takes months, or even weeks. The constant value-chain optimisation we’ve been working on since the 70s has finally cumulated in product and regulatory life-cycles that change faster than we can keep up.

Money is also becoming (or has become) more expensive, causing companies and deals to operate with less leverage. This means that there is less capital available for major projects, pushing companies to favour renting over buying, as well as creating a preference for smaller, incremental change over the major business transformation of the past.

And finally, companies are starting to take a truly global outlook and operate as one cohesive business across the globe, rather than as a family of cloned business who operate more-or-less independently in each region.

So what are the new 4 ± 2 rules? They’re not the old rules of asset management. We could argue that they’re the rules of modern manoeuvre warfare[5] (which would allow me to sneak in one of my regular John Boyd references[6]), but that would be have the tail wagging the dog as it’s business, and not IT that has that responsibility.

I think that the new rules cast IT as something like that of a pit crew. IT doesn’t make the parts (though we might lash together something when in a pinch), nor do we steer the car. Our job is to swap the tyres, pump the fuel, and straighten the fender, all in that sliver of time available to us, so that the driver can focus on their race strategy and get back out on track as quickly as possible.

With that in mind, the following seems to be a fair (4 ± 2) minimum set to start with.

• Timeliness. A late solution is often worse than no solution at all, as you’ve spent the money without realising any benefit. Or, as a wise sage once told me, management is the art of making a timely decision, and then making it work. Where before we could take the time to get it right (after all, the solution will be in the field for a long time and needs to support a lot of people, so better to discover problems early rather than later), now we just need to make sure the solution is good enough in the time available, and has the potential to grow to meet future demand. The large “productionisation” efforts of the past need to be broken into a series of incremental improvements (à la Gmail and the land of perpeputal beta), aligning investment with both opportunity and realised value.
• Availability. Not just up time, but ensuring that all stakeholders (both in and outside the company, including partners and clients) can get access to the solutions and data they need. There’s little value in a sophisticated knowledge base solution if the sales team can’t use it in the field to answer customer questions in real time. Once they’ve had to fire up the laptop, and the 3G card, and the VPN, the moment has passed and the sale lost. Or worse, forcing them to head back to the bricks and mortar office. As I pointed out the other week, decisions are more important than data[7], and success in this environment means empowering stakeholders to make the best possible decisions by ensuring that the have the data and functions they need, where they need, when they need it, and in a format that make it easy to consume.
• Agility. Agility means creating an IT estate that meet the challenges we can see coming down the road. It doesn’t mean creating an infinitely flexible IT estate. Every bit of flexibility we create, every flex point we add, comes at a cost. Too much flexibility is a bad thing[8], as it weighs us down. Think of formula one cars: they’re fast and they’re agile (which is why driving them tends to be a young mans game), and they’re very stiff. Agility comes from keeping the weight down and being prepared to act quickly. This means keeping things simple, ensuring that we have minimum set of moving parts required. The F1 crowd might have an eye for detail, such as putting nitrogen[9] in the tyres, but unnecessary moving parts that might reduce reliability or performance are eliminated. Agility is the cross product of weight, speed, reliability and flexibility, and we need to work to get them all into balance.
• Sustainability. Business is not a sprint (ideally), and this means that cost and reliability remain important factors, but not the only factors. While timeliness, availability and agility might be what drive us forward, we need still need to ensure that IT is still a smooth running operation. The old rules saw cost and reliability as absolutes, and we strived to keep costs as low, and reliability as high, as possible. The new rules see us balancing sustainability with need, accepting (slightly) higher costs or lower reliability to provide a more timely, available or agile solution while still meeting business requirements. (I wonder if I should have called this one “balance”.)

While by no mean complete or definitive, I think that’s a fair set of rules to start the discussion.

References
1. The rules of Enterprise IT @ PEGLEO: Lyons Electronic Office. The first business computer. @ WikipediaThe IT department we have today is not the IT department we’ll need tomorrow @ PEGThe new normal @ McKinsey QuarterlyManeuver warfare @ WikipediaJohn Boyd @ WikipediaDecisions are more important than data @ PEGHaving too much SOA is a bad thing (and what we might do about it) @ PEGUnderstanding the sport: Tyres @ formula1.com↑