Lasting Improvements in Technology

One of the most exciting benefits of uniting Business and IT is bringing true and lasting improvement to an organization's technology and and business processes. The promise of a streamlined and state-of-the-art business, quickly delivered and scalable beyond today's needs, is what we leaders strive to fulfill for our organizations.

Especially when beginning any new technology venture for an organization - whether it be a brand new organization-wide system, a major system-wide infrastructure upgrade, or simply a reclamation of broken and decayed business processes via a series of system sunsets - there is a certain electric buzz, a great sense of optimism, and a desire to improve quickly. Our organizations want to see immediate improvements and positive ROI within 6 to 18 months. And to be sure, it is easy to make marked improvements in systems and processes that are bloated or just plain awful.

But for leaders who are uniting business and IT - especially CIOs, CTOs, and COOs - we always have in our mind that the real challenge and achievement is sustaining these improvements over a three to five year span. This often requires us to shepherd change and improvement through perhaps one or more paradigm shifts in technology thinking and implementation. We acknowledge the fact of life that technology will come and go, and that keeping pace with the advances in technology can provide a competitive edge. We do not just introduce a new technology, expect it to take hold immediately with zero consequences, and wait for the right "gotcha" moment to blame the technology for not sustaining improvement.

As an example, take Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) - perhaps one of the largest paradigm shifts and technology buzzwords over the past 20 years. For the vast majority of organizations, today's tools make SOA exciting, approachable, and quite doable. It is true that you can implement quickly and within 18 months see measurable improvement in your business processes. But, as with most improvement initiatives and technology paradigms, there is much more to consider.

Bringing SOA into an organization can be exciting, but aside from the technology ramifications, the effect on organizational culture is tremendous. Has your organization considered and provided acceptable answers to these questions:

- Does your organization expect services to be publicly available "at their fingertips"?
- Is your organization acknowledging and accepting the contractual terms of each service, including the data formats and valid data values that need to be marshaled across divisions?
- Is your organization willing to monitor and measure the usage and performance of these services?
- Can your organization measure the capacity for adaptability and extension of these services?
- Does your organization expect to be able to construct on-the-fly "composite products" based on using your services as building blocks? And what constitutes acceptable performance and turnaround speed?
- Will the new technology and service-orientation match the goals and values of your company?

Considering these questions, ironing them out to create sufficient answers for your organization, and overhauling your organization's technology to represent your organization's values towards SOA, will certainly take longer than you may expect or plan for. You will need to let your technology breathe and work in your environment for a while as you streamline your answers to the above questions. But creating those "composite products" based on the service-oriented building blocks will come when your service-oriented technology can measure up to the terms of service you set forth.

Much like the old advice to live in a new house and get acclimated to it before fully furnishing every room, so must we get acclimated to the new technologies and paradigms that we bring to our organizations before improving on them. We must continually ask ourselves the above questions, and evaluate the technology improvements we make - both the quick ones, and the ones made over time. Sustain improvements over a three to five year period, and your organization will have hit the jackpot.