2008 notwithstanding, this year is shaping up to be one that will truly change the playing field of business; the one that will introduce new competitors to the landscape while retiring others. Perhaps, like me, you have begun to ask - who will lead the way?
Well, the one answer that I propose that you consider is YOU! When you examine the usage of your technology to run your business, ask yourself if you are leading the way:
- When you must examine your daily sales or P&L reports at 9 pm, only because "they cannot possibly be produced any earlier", are you leading the way?
- When your intranet web application needs a twice-daily reboot during the most critical portion of the business day, adding an extra hour or more to your business principals' workday, are you leading the way?
- You've approved the $350k middleware solution and the matching salary overhead to produce a critical automated data pipeline. Yet six months later, your technologists are taking turns arriving early at 6 am to manually start up the first few stages of the pipeline, and once or twice a week this is inevitably delayed. In addition, your technologists are heroically correcting data and processing errors in-flight several times a week. Are you leading the way?
- When, after a long day's work, you are logging into your organization's systems every night at 3 am, just to watch the overnight jobs run and "make sure" that nothing goes wrong, are you leading the way?
- When a major data stream is unavailable during a critical processing period, and no alternative streams or pipelines exist, your business process is delayed indefinitely. During this delay, are you leading the way?
Like most of you, these are just a few of the many issues that I have had hands-on experience addressing and resolving for the benefit of our businesses. Perhaps you and I also have produced some issues of our own that needed a different angle of consideration, a different path to success. Resolving these issues, and many more like them, is what we leaders must strive for.
So, for 2009, will the way you use technology give you the confidence to run your business well, handle the exceptions that arise, and allow yourself to sleep? Will your technology let you and your business lead the way?
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2 comments:
Hi Jason,
You make a great point!
As a business analyst, I have the responsibility "lead the way". Continuous improvement is everyone's mandate but it starts with You (I mean "me"). ;-)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
- Adrian
Publisher, ModernAnalyst.com
One key component that is missing here is MONEY. It takes money to implement these fantasies which sound great in technical journals but are very costly and time consuming to implement in the real world during recessionary times. And companies are forced to reduce headcount and IT costs when things go badly. It is up to each member of technology to reduce defect rates using the existing infrastructure and to possibly shut-down some systems that are expensive to support. Leading the way in IT without a budget is very difficult.
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