You al heard the rumours of running our IT-department as a common business line. Well that is a nice one-liner that chews away very easy at board room level. "Yes that is the solution for our problems with IT, we weren’t running it as a business. Those guys were pretending they were extraordinary, but the last few years we have seen the other side. Now it is over, we are going to run this department as a usual business."
Personally I totally agree with most of this vision. No there is no real magic in IT when you strip down every technical obscuring problems. But to really run/manage IT as a common business line they need the proper IT-system to support their task. I have seen many IT-managers complaining about the use of Excel in the business-lines. That’s totally true, but the sad part of is that the IT-department is probably the champion! Excel sheets of project, use of budget, managementreports over time-sheets (although there is a sophisticated time & resource management system in place). What I didn’t see so far is an integrated IT-system to support the whole IT-department (a kind of ERP system for this department).
With an integrated system I mean, a system that can track all the projects that are in progress, which I coupled to an architecture landscaping pointing out which part of the architecture is touched. Answering simple questions as what are the top-5 critical business components (services, DLL’s.). How many percentage of my programs are written in Cobol. When I am taking out this part of the system, which business processes will fall over. As I said before to my knowledge I haven’t seen such an system (and yes Tivoli, Telelogic, Popkin, Niku, etc, are only addressing a fragmented part of it).
My statement we can run IT-as a business very cleverly, if we have an integrated IT-system. Any comments/ideas/thoughts?
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