A realistic approach to IT
IT should not view itself as a 'controls and standards' group that tells the business what to do. Instead, it should get others excited about using technology to drive business goals--and this requires a change of mindset and culture. At the same time, the business side should take responsibility for IT. One idea is for the business and tech sides to share a service score card, providing metrics that can be tied directly back to the IT department. That means that decisions regarding which projects should receive priority, in terms of spending, are set by the business, not by IT. And when it comes to security, instead of putting a fortress outside your firewall and not letting anyone in, IT departments should develop their application layer assuming that people are going to get inside the network. But once they are inside, make it difficult for them to access applications. Use something called the "sticky pudding approach" to help resolve the security versus open access dilemma.
To get more about a realistic approach to IT:
- read the article at IT World Canada
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Comments
By Ajit Kapoor | Posted 8:30am | April 3, 2007
The issue about IT and business to work together will never go away unless we have qualified executives in IT that can communicate with the CEO. The topic is in vogue and has been for quite sometime but articles like this do little to bring all the issues on the table from both sides. Having been in the business for 40 years both as product development marketing and in IT I have never seen so many resources wasted to achieve so little and all the waste is justified by playing blame-game. I am a business person and got into IT by accident, the two sides will never meet if they don't stop having contempt for each other. CEOs have to be the leader to referee this duel to make it a benefit for business rather than establish and prove business IT hierarchy. Today there is no business that can survive and innovate without IT, but many will die a slow death by using technology as a silo to address the nearterm problem. As long as businesses do not want to treat IT as a strategic resource and continue to deploy it as a point solution, and IT cannot continue in its quest to deliver a better mousetrap the IT business divide will make good money making consulting practice. Bottom Line; Treat IT as a strategic resource and think in longer term and deploy in incremental fashion keeping in sight the long term vision and this is the Enterprise Architecture. Unfortunately we hire Architects for doing development on J2EE and .Net platform.