The only shop in the world….the inevitable backslide that results when you cannot say “no” to your Business
In the previous article on this topic, we looked at two key pressures facing the CIO today - rising demand by users for I.T services, both in terms of volume and complexity, as well as pressures from the CFO to take cost out of I.T in a challenging economic climate.
What happens when demand is left un-tempered - the performance backslide……
While technology advances have enabled the CIO a brief respite by enabling I.T to do more with less, there is a certain point at which I.T is simply not able to reconcile the demands of users with the budget that it has been provided.
This realization often occurs after the Business has experienced years of steady I.T performance degradation as underinvestment in I.T drives a slow downward spiral in its ability to serve the business; day by day, I.T finds itself being able to deliver fewer new services. The services that I.T does support become increasingly prone to disruption and outages.
Much of the degradation is due to the Business piling on the pressure on I.T. to do more with less. It is the I.T support and development teams that feel the brunt of this and to such an extent that they must resort to cutting corners to meet Business demand. Cutting corners results in a reduction of quality in I.T services. Teams end up spending a greater and greater proportion of their time dealing with the issues that are created by cutting corners than in developing I.T services for new capabilities.
In troubled I.T departments that are in the throes of this backslide, the mode of operation of the organization is‘fire-fighting’.
In this state, the I.T organization is solely preoccupied with dealing with major issues, such as service outages, as opposed to focusing on building and supporting I.T services which will create long term value to the business.
It is easy to spot the symptoms – it will take less than a few minutes of walking through the halls of I.T to spot what is termed as an ‘ant pile’. This is a colloquialism that describes a large team of support, engineering I.T. staff and senior I.T vice presidents or directors crowded around a console, attempting to troubleshoot an unexpected service issue by piecing together preceding events from access logs.
Anatomy of a backslide – Circumvention of Q.A processes in support and operations...
Often I.T support and operations is blamed for these outages and the ‘ant piles’ that ensure. While this is partially true - technicians often ignore change processes, making untested changes directly to production that result in unforeseen ripple effects to other systems - this ignores the bigger picture at work.
Technicians are usually individuals that are bearing the brunt of Business demands; the Business frequently puts pressure on technicians to force through changes and fixes at short notice. To accommodate the Business, technicians bypass lengthy quality control procedures which are designed to ensure that changes are sufficiently thought through.
In a rush to satisfy the Business in the short term, the technicians end up harming both the relationship and business productivity in the long term by introducing poorly thought through solutions into the production environment that end up breaking some other production system.
Anatomy of a backslide – Rushed low quality new software and services feeds the downward spiral…
Engineers that are responsible for delivering new I.T services to the Business are subject to the same pressures of untempered business demand and limited resources that the technicians are under. Their situation is exacerbated by production issues which divert engineers’ time from their day-job to assist technicians in resolving production support issues.
Production support ought to be a minor aspect in an engineer’s role. However in a situation where the I.T organization is firefighting, engineers fall into the trap of spending an increasing about of time sitting alongside their technician colleagues, tracing root causes to production issues.
Faced with slipping schedules for their projects and Business demands to ‘stay on schedule’, engineers take shortcuts in the manner by which they build and deploy I.T products and services. Usually this involves rushing new functionality into production that has not been adequately tested. As a deadline approaches, testing is the first aspect of a project that gets eroded. It is the unfortunate mindset an I.T. department who cannot say no to its customers.
Delivering new services that are either of low quality or late can significantly hold back the Business. After all, new I.T services are designed to enable Business to develop new capabilities such as better cost management or improved opportunities to generate revenues or profits.
Once again, the short term gain of pleasing the Business is replaced by a set of far graver longer term problems as the time required to resolve quality issues associated with “rushing-out” these new services tend to outweigh the time and benefits saved by rushing out the changes.
Falling into the white glove treatment trap…
Another cause of the backslide can be due to I.T providing a ‘the white glove treatment’ to the Business. This is a term that describes a situation whereby I.T provides a highly personalized support service where face to face support is the norm and no I.T request from the Business can be considered unreasonable. In this situation the floodgates are, in effect, open.
Once provided to the Business, ‘the white glove treatment’ can become a powerful habit that is difficult to fix.
In addition, I.T quickly loses the ability to manage and monitor cost and performance as the Business often circumvents the service desk to call service engineers directly. Operations and support I.T executives quickly find that they have no understanding or insight into what I.T issues are occurring and the amount of time that staff are spending to resolve issues.
Furthermore, supporting the Business’ requirement for face to face support requires a huge I.T field services organization which becomes expensive for I.T.
In conclusion…
These are a few examples of how demand and cost pressures can lead to a downward spiral in I.T performance. It is an insidious situation that may be hard to recognize until services have degraded to a point at which the Business is suffering from I.T service quality is a chronic and severe. Correcting the problem takes significant time, additional resources and some tough conversations between the CIO and his Business stakeholders.
In the next article, "The only shop in the world….making demand the business’s problem”, we explore how a technique called cost-to-serve is often used used to effectively drive the conversation with the Business around managing demand.