The Sum of IT Can be Greater than Its Parts
Excerpted from the new book CIO Best Practices, this essay compares the IT department to a symphony and contends that every piece of IT is just as important as the next.
By William Flemming and Alan Stratton
If one were to ask symphony patrons and symphony professionals what section of instruments in an orchestra is the most important, the answer would surely be all of them. Composers utilize every section and every instrument when writing symphonies. Symphony orchestras have steadily changed since they first appeared in ancient Egypt, and the role of every instrument has evolved over time. The end game for a conductor is to get all the sections to perform in harmony. Performing without a section of instruments leaves a gap that cannot be hidden.
Posing the same question to IT customers and IT professionals, pick the most important part of IT – pick the one process, one section of infrastructure, or the one department that stands out as the most strategic piece of IT – what would be your answer? Does IT have one most important strategic piece? If one asked this question of industry vendors and analysts, their answer would invariably be the product or service they sell. If one asks CIOs this question, the answers depend upon the state of IT maturity, the most pressing need of the day, and the state of the business where they work.
The SAS cut-to-the-chase answer is this: None of the pieces are strategic by themselves. None. IT has too many parts.
Often organizations gather these parts into technology stovepipes and manage them accordingly. Technology stovepipes lead to incoherence and disharmony within and outside of IT. IT Finance is often just another stovepipe within a stovepipe. Reporting the cost of service without including the results of the service is an example of a stovepipe telling only part of the story, one section playing in isolation. Conversely, reporting service results without the corresponding cost and value is also only part of the story. No single stovepipe can reveal the sum of the parts of IT. To understand why, let’s extend the symphony analogy to help cut through the abstractness and complexity that is IT.
Because symphony orchestras are not created equal, consider the situation of a poorly conducted, overburdened, large city symphony orchestra. Due to budget constraints, the symphony has to settle for young, inexperienced musicians to replace departing musicians. To compensate for their shortcomings and develop these new musicians, the orchestra consumes most of its rehearsal time training and correcting mistakes. To increase efficiency, the orchestra sections rehearse individually until they each become proficient. As a result the sections have difficulty finding the time to play together as a full orchestra – the case of the Silo Orchestra. The score calls for the orchestra to play in harmony. Individual sections cannot carry an entire symphony; nor can they practice in isolation and then perform in public with perfect harmony.
It comes as no surprise to hear that in past seasons the public performances of this orchestra were poorly played. Patrons became frustrated. Reputations suffered. Funding declined. As an institution, the orchestra was left with a foundation of poorly played symphonies, declining public support, and declining musician morale. Still, the demand for classical music remained high. The community depended on the symphony for a portion of its identity and an indication of the city’s prominence among the communities of the world.
With the competition orchestras face from other sources of classical music, expectations for Silo Orchestra performances rise higher and higher. In today’s musical world now so heavily dependent on technology, patrons constantly compare one orchestra’s performances to other orchestras’ recordings, performances broadcast from other cities with digital sound, and performances captured on DVDs played over home theater systems.
The lack of quality compared to competition quickly becomes very apparent to Silo Orchestra patrons.
To turn this orchestra around, how might its leadership approach learning a new repertoire and building the orchestra at the same time? Or, more to the point, how does this analogy apply to IT? How does IT learn a new season’s repertoire and build the orchestra to world-class caliber at the same time? IT organizations face the same dilemma as the orchestra.
- Learn new business “symphonies” (applications) every year with higher expectations than the year before.
- Learn to build a better orchestra (IT staff).
- Relearn the old, badly played symphonies.
All at the same time.
Like Silo Orchestra, many IT organizations have various stovepipes playing and rehearsing in isolation to gain efficiencies. Like the orchestra, the IT stovepipes are organized by sections. Woodwinds over here, UNIX over there, Finance in here. Although it is cheaper and more effective to have experts in one technology than generalists who must have skills across several technologies, IT organizations that depend on experts often lose view of the symphony. This leaves an IT organization where no one plays a strategic role and without any way to bring all the stovepipes together to play from the same score. Stovepiping is the classic misalignment conundrum: Each might do good work in isolation, but how can the CIO tell if the right part is being played correctly, much less harmoniously and strategically?
The enterprise pays IT to play the symphony of business applications. Like the orchestra, IT’s sections must play harmoniously together to deliver strategic value. Best practice CIOs know that none of the IT organization’s parts can function strategically unless IT functions in strategic unison as a whole.
This chapter goes on to examine the strategic role of IT Finance by emphasizing that IT Finance cannot be strategic by itself. Finance must be joined with other IT governance and processes to develop symphonic capabilities and work together in harmony with enterprise strategy. Check out the book CIO Best Practices: Enabling Strategic Value with Information Technology to learn more.
Bio:
Alan Stratton is an independent consultant specializing in cost and performance management.
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