* Organization and process drive IT change
Several times a year, I am asked to speak before various groups on the state of some aspect of IT. While it is clear to anyone with even half a brain that the state of IT is – if nothing else – in a “flux,” what causes this change and where the change is driving the enterprise IT shop are of course the real questions. How can we understand IT change?
At Enterprise Management Associates, my colleagues and I look at the several aspects of change that are affecting IT. We do this to help our IT and vendor clients understand what is coming down the pike, and to help them become more effective agents when it comes time to facilitate these transformations.
Many of the most important drivers of change often have little to do with the technology facets of IT, and have much more to do with IT’s business and “social” aspects. This often makes an analysis of IT at a large site both an intricate and an interesting topic for investigation.
This is not to say that technology directions don’t play a major part in IT change; however, it certainly should be taken as a statement that the IT manager who looks only at technology is missing several key parts of the IT mix.
In addition to technology, EMA also finds two other general categories to be important: organization and process.
“Organization” includes people, culture, and organizational structure, and is one of the fundamental drivers in IT evolution. “Processes” refer to five components: service support, operations management, service delivery, resource management, and security.
Readers of this column over the years know that I am a willing slave to the concept of a “systems” approach to most things. In a nutshell (possibly a very appropriate cliché in this instance), this means that no individual part of any system can be properly understood without looking at its interrelationships with the other parts of the system.
It will then come as no surprise to my readers that the interrelationships between these three segments I mention above – technology, process and organization – are crucial to understanding how IT systems develop. No matter which of these groupings you look at, it is always important to keep in mind that any single category can only be accurately understood in context with the other two.
Some of my readers have called me to task on occasion for trying to turn IT managers into bean counters. Shame on me for that, I suppose – and perhaps now double shame on me for trying to turn them into industrial sociologists as well. In my own defense, please keep in mind that the humanware and the way it is managed is just as important as the hardware and software. IT personnel are, after all, the human expert system that runs our computer rooms, and it is their finest actions that define the best practices all our policies try to emulate.
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Thanks to all who participated in our 2005 Great Storage Haiku Contest. We’ll be printing the winning entries in this column next week.
