Being in a technology management role is becoming increasingly difficult. We have to constantly balance conflicting factors. Here is a partial list.
- The pace of technological evolution continues to accelerate. Before we have a chance to adopt the most recent wave of promising evolution, the world is moving onto next. SOA, CEP, Web 2.0
- Business community demands faster response. While they consider IT indispensable, IT is also viewed as a roadblock to achieving business objectives.
- Current corporate environment is always shifting. Companies are buying other companies or getting bought out. This leads to a very short term focus and makes it difficult to make fundamental changes necessary for long term health of the organization.
- There are Legacy systems and Legacy people afraid to adopt to changes
- Sorting through vendor hypes and reality requires being on-guard all the time. The danger of over reliance on the latest technological silver bullet can lead to a lot of wasted time(POC etc.), while ignoring latest technological advances could potentially lead to a situation where the entire business model could be at risk (e.g. travel agencies)
- Only a minority of IT people "get it", when it comes to things that yield long term benefits such as Enterprise Architecture, SOA etc. Most are more comfortable dealing with day to day requirements and are not interested in long term.
I am sure there a number of other factors. I will talk about these topics in future postings.
1 comment:
I agree with all of the "technology manager blues" statements. I propose a few solutions that can help the "Technology Managers" or "Enterprise Architects" communities.
The EA/ Technology Manager community can strive to collaborate via open forums to share or comment on both technology concepts and/or to share tips on how to communicate with the business the value of IT being given the "right" amount of time to prototype and test out concepts.
The product vendor community can also participate in helping clear the IT clutter by sharing conceptual architecture models or designs demonstrating "specific business scenarios", documenting product usage patterns and by sharing common test cases. Other artifacts that can be shared out include code samples and executables that can be quickly deployed in the IT "sandbox environments" to test the architecture concept. This may in fact bode well for the product vendors as they are able to give IT resources a jump start in their prototyping efforts but also helps IT develop a new level of confidence in the vendor product as it has a "working" prototype.
Another way to help address the problem of IT being the bottleneck is to leverage the open source community work to help implement quick turnaround type business solutions in business areas that have less stringent security/ response time needs. These types of solutions allow IT to demonstrate its ability to increase speed to market in creating solutions for non-mission critical business areas. This way IT is able to turn the tide on the negative image it has developed. This of course requires that EA and/or technology managers are more accepting of the "less than perfect" solutions to address pressing business needs.
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