Tom Breur
20 May
2018
Business
and IT never looked like a marriage made in heaven to me. Whether that is
because DBA’s and MBA’s don’t mingle, I don’t know. To me it sometimes looks
like trying to dissolve gasoline in water. Not easy. For years I’ve been
hearing talk about “running IT like a business”, an idea that originated with Gartner, I believe. But I rarely see it
happening!
Here’s an
observation: what happens to IT projects that “don’t deliver”? Admittedly, due
to the oftentimes ambiguous nature of IT deliverables, the notion of “success”
is subject to interpretation. But here’s the rub: when the going gets tough,
divergent perspectives on what constitutes success are bound to drive
stakeholders apart.
Sometimes struggling
projects are abandoned and turn into zombies. If you ever find yourself on one of
those projects with insufficient resources to succeed, but just enough to
continue in “maintenance mode” – run for the hills! Or as one of my friends
once joked: “Oh wait! I am just reminded I urgently need to go floss my cat at
home”
The reason
why I am skeptical about the premise of “running IT like a business” is because
of investment and management considerations. In IT I see projects sometimes
being descoped to the point of not (no longer) delivering any real value. No
business manager would eve dream of doing that to their operation.
The most
significant telltale to me, however, is that failing IT projects are driven
into the ground. Not a pretty sight. Show me an IT project that gets canceled
halfway into the timeline (like a business might get “restructured”), before using their entire budget, and
I’ll have another think.
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