Is an IT department like an organism?
If you were to work with that analogy, you might compare the network to the central nervous system, but after that, things will start to get a bit hazy and arbitrary.
Is the fileserver or the database server the heart?
Is the CTO the brain of the organism, or is it that crusty engineer who has been there since the department was started and is seemingly the go-to person on any complex question about how things work?
Truth be told, comparing IT to an organism generally isn’t all that suitable an analogy – but there is one aspect, unfortunately, where the comparison does work.
How many IT departments have you seen over the years where unstructured, uncontrolled organic growth that overwhelms the otherwise orderly function of the department? Sometimes it’s an individual sub-group exerting too much control and refusing to work within the bounds of a cooperative budget. Other times it’s an individual project that has just got way out of control and no-one is willing to pull the plug.
Even if we struggle to keep up the analogy of IT-as-an-organism, there’s an ugly medical condition that can be compared to unstructured, uncontrolled organic growth which threatens to overwhelm the IT department (or a section thereof): cancerous.
You see, it’s often easy to disregard such growth as just being about numbers – number of hours, number of dollars, but no real impact. Yet, having watched a previous employer crash and burn while two cancerous activities ate away at the engineering department, it’s something I’m acutely aware of when I’m dealing with companies. Most companies make the same mistake, too – they ignore the growth because they see it as just a numbers game. At the coal face though it’s not. You’ve potentially got people knowing that they’re working on a doomed or otherwise pointless project. Or you’ve got people who are impacted by that uncontrolled growth coming out of another section. Or worse, the overall parent business is affected because IT is no longer doing the job it was commissioned to do all those years ago.
I learnt to read simultaneously while learning to talk, thanks to a severe speech impediment and lots – lots – of flashcards. It had a variety of profound influences on how I deal with the world, something I’ve really only come to grasp in the last 12 months. For instance, some words and phrases spark a synaesthesia response – a word is not just a word, but a picture as well. For me, “calling a spade a spade”, so to speak, can be about conveying the mental image I get when I think of a word or phrase. In this case, when I hear about “unstructured organic growth” within an organisation, the mental image of a tumour immediately appears to me.
Like real cancer, there’s no easy solution. An IT department in this situation has some difficult and quite possibly painful decisions to make. Terminating an overrunning project for instance is a classic scenario. After all, much as it’s easy to say “don’t throw good money after bad”, we’re all human, and the temptation is to let things run for a little longer in case they suddenly rectify.
That’s how you can get 1 year into a 3 month new system implementation project and still not be finished.
Many managers complain that backup systems are a black hole, and I’m the first to admit that if you don’t budget correctly, they can indeed become a financial sump. However, I’m also the first to challenge that as a blanket rule backups just suck budget – they have CapEx, and they have OpEx, and planned/amortised correctly, they are no more likely to cause a budget blow-out than any other large system within an organisation. In a well running backup environment, financial blow-outs in backup costing usually means there’s a problem elsewhere: either storage capacity is not being adequately monitored and forecast, or systems growth is not being adequately monitored and forecast.
Yet, as a consultant, once you’re embedded within an organisation, even if you’ve had to push through budgetary considerations for backups at an excruciating amount of detail and precision, you’re equally likely to encounter at least one, if not more areas of cancerous growth within an IT department. That might sound like a gripe – I don’t mean it that way. I just mean: uncontrolled, organic growth is nothing to be ashamed of, and it’s not unique to any organisation. In fact, I’d hazard a guess that pretty much every IT organisation will encounter such a situation every few years.
Like the proverbial problem of sticking your head in the sand, the lesson is not to insist they never happen – that would be nice, but it just doesn’t play well with human nature. The real challenge is to encourage an open communications strategy that allows people to freely raise concerns. It may sound trite, but an IT organisation that promotes the Toyota Way is one to be envied: a belief in continuous improvement rather than focusing on huge changes, and a preparedness to allow anyone to put their hand up and ask, “Wait. Should we keep doing this?”