How would organisations cope if IT departments, in the traditional sense, disappeared within the next 10 years and how would they handle a world without IT projects?
These issues were explored by Gartner group VP and fellow Tom Austin, at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2005 in Cape Town earlier this week. Several analysts created a "maverick" presentation called "thinking out of the box".
"In this presentation, we sample some of the results we obtained when we challenged our analysts to explore predictions that are unusual, unlikely - even perverse," he said.
He noted that any organisation thinking about implementing large, strategic projects has to consider how easy or difficult it is to implement changes in areas such as underlying IT systems, corporate culture, organisation structure and business processes.
"The need to build a responsive, flexible organisation is a top-rated issue for senior business executives. Business leaders view IT as an inflexible infrastructure that gets in the way of quick, strategic implementations - not an enviable place to be when continuous change is a prerequisite for survival. As the caretaker of this inflexible infrastructure, the IT department is doomed."
The "big bang" approach to applications and projects is an impediment to change, Austin argued. He added that enterprise software vendors emerged because it is more cost-effective for a few vendors to create a range of ERP, CRM, SFA and CAD software systems, than for each organisation to build its own.
However, he said, demand for enterprise software applications has flattened, as enterprises need only so many ERP (and equivalent) systems.
Rapid evolution
"Is this the end of rapid evolution of the software industry, where all that remains is to refine the systems already installed and tune the investment to promote operational efficiency?" Austin asked.
He added that the primary investment in enterprise software will not be predetermined functionality, refined over time by a vendor to provide the most-economic match for the maximum number of enterprises. It will be the common platform of integration, configuration and adaptation tools.
"This is a huge shift, not so much in technology as in culture, expectations, metrication and skills," he stated.
A world without projects, Austin said, has four key ingredients, which include the platform of tools and techniques that enable systems to be continuously adapted.
Fundamental to this platform, he argued, is an appropriate level of granularity for the components and services that comprise the "raw materials" for this process. This must be combined with appropriate levels of abstraction to represent decisions about the content and operation of systems.
Another ingredient, said Austin, are the skills to use this platform. Given the substantial shift in the approach to projects, these will often be much different from traditional development or business analysis skills.
The third ingredient is that some reuse can be designed into systems, but more emerges as systems are used and the opportunity for standardisation emerges - particularly at a business level. The continuous improvement process must superimpose the standardisation and reuse process over the enhancement activity to ensure cost and complexity control, he said.
Lastly, Austin stated, the crucial role of the project office becomes monitoring a process, via its results, not judging plans created in advance of work being undertaken - this completes the feedback loop.
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