The purpose of IT?
posted by Marty Menard on January 17, 2007
I had dinner the other night with a few of my CIO Staff peers and a senior Intel fellow*. During dinner, the conversation evolved to a a discussion of the purpose of IT. We use the term Teachable Point of View (or TPOV) to communicate the salient or summarized message we want people to remember. The collecitive intelligence created a TPOV on the purpose of IT and I’d like to share our thoughts with you and get your feedback. Without begging, don’t be shy on this topic!
So, our TPOV about the purpose of IT is:
Automate tasks that are manual or labor intensive and redistribute employees to greater areas of need; improve productivity of the employees to generate better results; enable better decision making by consolidating information; and improve the profitability of the enterprise.
OK, so it is a little long! The definition started with the first section (efficiency and automation) and we kept adding, with comma’s, additional thoughts. We kept asking ourselves, “Are all of these necesarry and sufficient?” trying to understand if we had too many components, or not enough incorporated into this definition. After some debate we struggled with the priortiziation of the items but agreed all were significantly part of the purpose of IT.
If I think about my organization and role, I attempt to deliver all of these elements in my job. I’m focused on improving the utilization of our server assets and simplifying the enviornment so I need fewer ‘feet on the street’ to run the assets. By moving employees into a role that “creates” rather than “supports” we can innovate and add more value. All the while reducing cost (Capital and Deprecation for servers and data centers) and improving our margin.
We also have a team focused on deploying Platform Lifecycle Management capabilities that improve the productivity of the design leaders so they have information to make better decisions on platform tradeoffs, keeping the market informed so meet our commitments. The positive impact of my IT efforts alone is hundreds of millions of dollars from cost avoidance and time to market results.
My peers had similiar experiences for their customer/stakeholders. Do you as well? How would you modify the purpose?
So what do you think the purpose of IT is?
Good Computing, Marty
(*Note: The “Fellow” category is attributed to employees who have achieved outstanding technical results for the company.)
Comments (6)
tagged: avoidance, Cost, information, IT, productivity, technology
Comments
Jan 19 | Nathan said:
Marty, sometimes a look in the mirror helps you define what you do into what is valuable and what you do because you’ve been doing it for so long. Formally, this is business process architecture. Identifying the core processes the company executes as well as the enabling. Process by process you measure the impact of enabling (IT) processes to the execution of the core processes and you cut away what is not impacting or effectively impacting the core processes. What you have left is what IT does. (In my opinion)
Jan 19 | Josh Maher said:
The TPOV is good as written to describe the traditional corporate IT department (after all IT generally grew from accounting systems). I think there needs to be a little more clarification though on the difference between IT in the sense of a business enablement function (e.g. accounting system) vs. IT in the sense of a business product (e.g. online banking) vs. IT in the sense of a marketing/sales/interaction platform (e.g. web site/blog/store). The TPOV certainly doesn’t describe the second two; however, it hits the first one on the nose.
If the group was mostly CIO types, that makes sense…that is your view of IT (under the CIO). If you added some CTO types, and a couple of Product Managers….the conversation would be much more exhausting and a TPOV would be difficult to agree on. That leads to the question of what do you really call these things? They are all referred to as IT….but they are all not the same. I looked at a similar term recently on my blog…informationitis…meaning the state that a lot of CIOs (not CTOs or product managers) are in today.
Jan 20 | Steven Wagner said:
Automate tasks to reduce overhead,
So it seems like a great deal of allocating resources would entail building systems which automate tasks and organize information for management. Sounds like a good plan to me. A key part I see missing is “What kind of information needs to be gathered?” And I think that is a crucial part of the definition.
“Fewer ‘feet on the street’” is not a good direction from my experience. The problem is rarely that it is it takes too many people to acheive a goal. The problem is that the goal could be being acheived four times faster if all the gears were being lubed properly.
The feet that are hanging out in the data center are not being enabled with the tools they need to make their own lives easier. And at the same time IT management usually throws hardware at the problems since purchasing is one of their biggest talents. Sorry if I am not being tactful. Its just my particular perspective into this world.
So the information we are looking for can be automated statistics and alerts about the machines, but the biggest lack of intelligence is in being able to gather mob intelligence from the thousands of highly skilled engineers on the payroll. Enter the blog. Probably one of the most successful at organizing the skills of their engineers has been Google with their 20% employee time program, and their Tech Talks videos which allow employees to present new technologies. http://video.google.com/googleplex.html
I have no idea of what Platform Lifecycle Management could be. Maybe you can elaborate on this? I am understanding that “design leaders” are making decisions on “platform tradeoffs”? Which platforms are you referring to? Is this for standardization to make software deployment easier? I hope its not limiting the tools that employees have access to.
Jan 20 | Herve Kabla said:
The purpose of IT? Quite simple: IT helps mankind focus on what IT cannot do… Anytime there is a task that human being can get achieved by IT, let’s have it done that way and not spend time, money or efforts asking people to perform it. To my opinion, that’s what IT is designed to.
Now, in certain conditions (economical, political, religious, etc.) it’s better to have those tasks accomplished by men.
Jan 22 | Eleanor Wynn said:
Teachable Point of View, as I understood it, includes a perspective that you can state and support. There is always an implied theory embedded in what we think. The TPOV should make that theory explicit and support why it is so. To me, the purpose of IT goes beyond automation and simplification. That happened in the early days of IT. Because of IT, work and people have been distributed. My TPOV about IT is that it is the nervous system and communication channel for people and processes, and action. So, what needs to be done to facilitate those things is eliminate the noise in our IT tools, user interfaces, networks. Eliminate everything that distracts from the coordination of action purpose. Only IT can do that once we are scattered. “How can we do it best?” is the question.
Jan 31 | Chris said:
Resurrecting a bit of an old post here but I thought I’d share what I’ve found to be a useful summary of what corporate IT does (as opposed to production IT, i.e. revenue generating systems).
IT serves the function that secretaries did pre-computers. IT is the grease in the gears that enables others to work efficiently.
That mindset can also help to combat the tendency for IT staff to look down on “users”.