Minimal IT strategy

The minimal IT strategy summarises how a business can manage its IT to improve long-term cost, risk and responsiveness.

Information technology - asset and liability

Information technology (IT) is a critical business asset. It improves business efficiency, and allows business to operate in ways that would not otherwise be possible.

IT is also a liability. IT adds cost and risk to business, and constrains the ease with which business can change.

To maximise the added value of IT, IT liability must be minimised. The best way to minimise IT liability is to minimise the size and complexity of IT and the demands on the IT department, while still delivering the required business efficiency and capability.

In order of priority, the three major ground rules for minimising IT are:

1. Be clear about the role of IT in business and align IT with business responsibilities. This makes sure that IT is properly controlled and does not become an end in itself.
2. Maximise the longevity of IT investments. This reduces the cost, risk and disruption associated with IT replacement.
3. Exploit existing solutions and implementations where possible. This reduces the amount of IT that has to be acquired, implemented, operated and maintained.

Business alignment and the role of IT

It is important to distinguish between the role of IT and the role of the IT department. The role of IT itself, the role of the computers and the networks, is solely to automate the handling of information. The IT department has a wider role advising business on IT, providing IT services, and analysing and managing business change associated with IT.

These roles must not be confused. IT itself is not a driver of business change, and attempts to use IT to force business change waste money and leave a legacy of underused IT that continues to be a source of cost, risk and constraint. To avoid this:

• Business ownership, direction and decisions will be established before IT solutions are considered.
• Business process change will be defined prior to IT change.
• The way in which IT will add value by automating the handling of information will be established before any IT acquisition or implementation commences.

It is also vitally important that IT is understood and governed by business managers.

To ensure that this is the case, IT capability will be structured into systems the ownership and capabilities of which fall clearly within the boundaries defined by business organisational structure and responsibilities. Similarly, connections between systems will reflect meaningful business information and hand-offs of responsibility through business processes. Clear and effective business ownership of all business systems and connections between systems will be strenuously enforced.

Structuring systems and connections to reflect business structure will be given a higher priority than technical efficiency. No attempt will be made to optimise business unilaterally by modifying IT structures; IT change will always follow and support business change, not lead it.

Longevity of IT investments

The longevity of IT is critical because reducing the frequency of major IT change reduces the annualised cost, risk and disruption associated with major IT change by exactly the same amount. This recognition permeates all decisions about the acquisition, development and management of IT systems.

Where IT systems are developed in-house, the priority for development, in addition to meeting immediate business requirements, is to ensure that the solution has the qualities and characteristics that allow it to be managed for a long period at low cost and low risk, and with flexibility to allow the solution to change with time. IT management will put a high priority on deliverables which have a significant impact on long-term management, such as modular design, documentation and automated test routines. The IT department will recognise and reward behaviours that increase long-term improvements in cost, risk and responsiveness, and not incentivise individuals to compromise this in favour of short-term project goals.

Where packaged IT systems are considered, the main focus of technical evaluation will be on the ability to continue to run the system without excessive cost, risk and disruption, a large part of which is to avoid being forced into difficult upgrades or reacquisitions by vendor policy. To achieve this, a large margin of preference will be given to open source solutions, and to solutions where usage conforms to viable multi-vendor standards. Similarly, a large margin of preference will be given to open source and standards-based operating systems and system software, and to non-proprietary standards-based hardware.

The business and technical environment in which IT operates changes constantly. As a general principle, it is cheaper and less risky to keep IT up-to-date than to suffer the greater expense and disruption of complete replacement of systems that can no longer operate in the changed environment. This principle will be applied in all cases, rather than dilute management effort by looking for exceptions.

Given the complex and dynamic nature of IT, it is easy to lose visibility of changes and their impact. To address this, a process of periodic evaluation and proactive maintenance will be applied to all IT systems, to ensure that they are kept continually up-to-date.

Where IT does eventually require replacement, the old IT will be aggressively and completely decommissioned, to avoid the ongoing cost, risk and constraint that would otherwise come from keeping it running.

Exploiting existing solutions and implementations

When making business system and technology acquisition decisions, we will always look to exploit existing solutions and implementations.

• Packaged software will favoured over in-house developed software.
• General-purpose applications will be favoured over completely bespoke applications.
• Software-as-a-Service will be favoured over in-house installed software.
• Cloud-based and on-demand infrastructure will be favoured over in-house infrastructure.
• Virtual infrastructure (servers and storage) will be favoured over physical infrastructure.
• Shared solutions will be favoured over individual solutions.

In each case, however, greater priority will be given to meeting business requirements, ensuring that the structure of the IT reflects real business structures and responsibilities, and ensuring that IT can continue to run indefinitely at low cost and low risk, and without constraining future business change.

Publication note: this is a double-length "summer special" edition of the Minimal IT newsletter. I shall be taking some time off over the summer, and the Minimal IT newsletter will return in a few weeks time.

© Copyright 2012 Minimal IT Ltd. See the Minimal IT website for the original newsletter and copyright information.

Back to basics: Conflicts

Identifying areas of conflict opens up debate and helps us explore ways to deliver more value.

Over the past few weeks I have covered what I believe are the most important aspects for minimising your IT estate and IT demand, which is the key to long-term improvements in cost, risk and responsiveness.

I have covered:

• Focusing on the basic value proposition of IT: automating the storage, calculation and movement of information.
• Structuring IT so that it is easy to own and to manage.
• Managing IT proactively.
• Emphasising the qualities of delivered systems, such as documentation and testing, rather than development speed.
• Exploiting standards and open source.
• Using generic applications to reduce short-term and long-term costs.

Individually these ideas might not seem contentious, but taken together they form a controversial agenda. If you were to summarise a typical IT strategy, it would in many respects be the exact opposite:

The organisation will use IS to re-engineer business processes and create new business opportunities. All business data will be held on a single database to ensure a single version of the truth. Support costs will be strictly controlled to direct the maximum proportion of the IS budget to new systems, and rapid application development methods will be used to deliver new solutions quickly. We will partner with leading industry vendors, and enable business change through enterprise-grade commercial packages and in-house development.

It is useful to identify these conflicts with the mainstream view because it opens up and legitimises debate.

I also see a couple of conflicts within minimal IT. Some attempts to minimise IT estate and demand will increase it in other areas.

The first conflict is around proactive maintenance. Proactive maintenance works best when staff have a strong sense of ownership around systems. However, this can lead to an IT-led agenda, where the direction of the solution fits the interests and needs of the maintainers more than the users. I have seen the situation where staff do not bother with things like documentation and testing because they are so familiar that they do not see the need for it. And the architecture of closely-owned systems can be compromised when it is bent too much around one system, rather than more general standards. A strong, personalised sense of IT ownership can undermine the structure and discipline needed for effective long-term management.

The second conflict is around generic applications. Generic applications remove a lot of development cost and ongoing cost, and allow the organisation to focus more closely on their specific needs. However, the long-term manageability of solutions built on generic applications is problematic. You are very much at the mercy of the vendor, and you could be driven into replacement and upgrade activity that delivers no business value.

These internal conflicts within minimal IT do not worry me. If everything fitted together neatly, if I could present a perfect vision of minimal IT, I would be more worried. Real life is messy, and a world view without compromise is always suspect. Conflicts show us where we need to debate and to achieve balance. The more that we identify and articulate conflicts, the more we can improve how we manage IT and the value that we deliver.

© Copyright 2012 Minimal IT Ltd. See the Minimal IT website for the original newsletter and copyright information.

Back to basics: Extreme reuse

Our prejudices stop us achieving the highest levels of reuse.

When we talk about reuse, we usually mean reuse of code. This could be low-level reuse, such as libraries, or higher levels, such as frameworks and services.

Reuse at this level is valuable. It helps deliver sophisticated systems faster. Provided that you manage it well, you can reduce long-term costs and risks by exploiting reusable libraries, and this contributes to minimising your IT.

Valuable though this is, this is not extreme reuse. Extreme reuse is when you don't write your own code at all, but use code that has already been written and, ideally, reuse system instances that are already running.

The most obvious example of extreme reuse is to implement packaged software, rather than write your own. Where there is packaged software that meets your needs and budget, it makes sense to use it.

But packaged software can have problems. They may be no packages that meet your needs well, or packages that have many more features than you need, which means it is more complicated to learn and to use. Packages can be very expensive. Using packages can give you a long-term dependency on a supplier which undermines your ability to control your own destiny.

How can we get the extreme reuse advantages of packages without the problems?

I think the answer is "generic applications". This is software, ideally provided as an on-demand service, which is generally capable of a broad range of IT requirements, and which you can quickly configure to your specific needs.

There are lots of different sorts of generic applications.

The commonest is Excel. Many businesses are run on Excel. Although we in corporate IT might look down on this, it is a way of meeting requirements closely at low cost.

Microsoft Sharepoint has some of the characteristics of a generic application. You can quickly build many types of information system based on Sharepoint.

Other software can be bent to many purposes. SalesForce.com has grown from its sales background into a more general tool. Even our own Metrici Advisor can be configured to support pretty much any business requirement.

We don't exploit generic applications anything like as much as we could. Large numbers of home-written systems and ill-fitting packages could be replaced by relatively simple configurations of generic applications.

There are challenges with this, especially with long-term management, which I will cover next week. Despite these challenges there is a large untapped potential. The main barrier is our attitude within IT.

Exploiting generic applications runs up against our prejudices. We feel that they must be second rate because they are not proper packages, neither are they proper bespoke systems. These prejudices apply both within the IT department and across the broader business. We want to protect our position as the purveyors of expensive packages and exquisitely tailored solutions, and our business colleagues want systems that are reassuringly expensive or which are unique to them. To exploit generic applications, to achieve extreme reuse, and to minimise our IT costs and risks, we have to overcome our own prejudices.

© Copyright 2012 Minimal IT Ltd. See the Minimal IT website for the original newsletter and copyright information.