Should Your Organization Program Software?

To Program or not to Program: that is the Question

Stenographer using new dictaphone technology, LOC on flickr

Ahhh, the allure of programming. The sensual attraction of creating unique value and competitive advantage in a hard fought industry. It is an almost universal attraction. But before your IT department sits down to program, all of management must very honestly answer these questions:

Do we have the expertise to do this?
Are we re-inventing the wheel?
How much of our resources are we willing to divert from our core business?

Remember that less than 40% of IT projects meet their ROI and time goals. This is the elephant in the room of all technology discussions. If the organization is not absolutely expert at design, development and execution, success is further threatened. Leave IT projects to established experts, forgo egos and listen to them. On very large projects, consider employing a separate firm, even if it is only one or two people, whose sole purpose is to guide change and implementation.

Also remember that authoring enterprise software puts you in competition with every software house in the world. Like the Terminator, that is all they do. It is an unfortunate and overwhelming trend that organizations become subsumed with software development at the expense of managing their business. Given the terrifying failure rate, it is better to build additional management resource costs into the design. The choice is not to save money; it is whether the project will ever succeed.

Also consider that there is more than one way to skin the cat. And of course one never touches the source code of others. There are many methods to add unique value to third party software. Changing the source is not one of them. Hardwiring code kills applications and costs exorbitant upgrade sums in the long run. But it is still an alarmingly common practice.

Conclusions to software series

The rate of change of both macro and micro variables is increasing. That means business strategies are in a constant flux, and IT, as one of its most important enablers, must find new ways to integrate and nimbly adjust.

IT Metrics which begin with strategic alignment of business projects, ideally buttressed with embedded Associates, begins to guarantee an integrated approach to IT from top to bottom. These systemic and reporting changes reduce the formal collaboration burden and increase integration by placing IT in a more actively involved front line position where they belong.

Integrating IT portfolios with business projects transforms them from a cost center to an added value team member. The question of being involved and utilized or not has been totally subsumed. Now we’re rockin’.