Industrialisation of IT

(prompted by an organisation with a method for really focusing on business value)

A confluence of factors now allows some organisations to adopt dramatically new ways of getting more value from the systems more quickly - with less investment and less risk. Essentially this involves a non-incremental change (revolutionary) as aspects of IT move from being a craft to an industrial process.

The factors include: the existance in many organisations of extant suites that are capable of supporting most of the existing business processes; the adoption of standards for controlling how systems processes are orchestrated; adoption of common mechanism for systems to communicate; and maturity of the approaches to modelling processes and reporting on the execution of those processes. The acronyms associated with these factors include: ERP, BPEL, SOA, BPM and BAM.

These new approaches allow models to be created that represent how the organisation operates and that at the same time link directly to services (existing, well engineering, industrially tested and documented) in the enterprise suites. Optimising the business performance then becomes a matter of analysing the process models and

It will substantially reduce the level of expenditure that has traditionally been associated with the wanton customisation through low level coding of large application suites (e.g. ERP systems). This customisation is usually poorly conceived from a business perspective i.e. it is expensive, time consuming, risky and worst of all moves the understanding of how the organisation actually operates into code (the organisation doesn't really understand or control). What the customisation does ensure is that large development teams are required - usually provided by one of the "independent" consultants who have lead the organisation down the garden path of customisation in the 1st place. Frequently it will also require additional hardware and systems software so all the vendors of products and services win i.e. everyone wins except the end user.

The class of organisations are those whose major systems are these ERP systems (and other such systems as they mature) and scope is determined by what these suites are designed to do.

As with any revolution the people who benefit from status quo (the craft model) will resist these changes. The crafts people in this case are traditional developers who wish to hand craft systems in preference to assembling solutions from parts.

During the industrialisation of manufacturing to stop the resistance they made machine breaking (industrial sabotage) a capital crime, executed some saboteurs and deported transported many as prisoners to Australia. Almost two hundred years latter we can only hope the resistance will be less vociferous.

If organisation move to this paradigm they can largely remove IT as a blocker to change and the IT organisation can be downsized and redesigned to focus on innovation.