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.
